Its such a joy to watch! Don't know if it has more to do with moving to Mastodon and following a quite different crowd of people, but even before that, for the past few years I started sensing a (re)growing interest in #Forth-style languages and related philosophies, i.e. low fat, low energy, minimalism, self-sufficiency, interactive programming, dynamic systems, DSLs, VMs, emulation etc. Renewed interest in all this also seems to come from people with vastly different backgrounds & ages. Forth being one of the most underappreciated langs ever, 10 years ago it felt (subjective experience, no proof!) most active Forthers were either a) #RetroComputing people who've been using the language for decades and/or b) people working w/ severely resource constrained embedded devices (often an overlap). These groups still exist ofc, but I wouldn't be very surprised to learn if demographics taking an
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Its such a joy to watch! Don't know if it has more to do with moving to Mastodon and following a quite different crowd of people, but even before that, for the past few years I started sensing a (re)growing interest in #Forth-style languages and related philosophies, i.e. low fat, low energy, minimalism, self-sufficiency, interactive programming, dynamic systems, DSLs, VMs, emulation etc. Renewed interest in all this also seems to come from people with vastly different backgrounds & ages. Forth being one of the most underappreciated langs ever, 10 years ago it felt (subjective experience, no proof!) most active Forthers were either a) #RetroComputing people who've been using the language for decades and/or b) people working w/ severely resource constrained embedded devices (often an overlap). These groups still exist ofc, but I wouldn't be very surprised to learn if demographics taking an active interest (above and beyond doing some toy examples) have started shifting noticeably.
Back in 2015, the ForthHub org on GitHub had a dozen or so members, today its ~240. /r/Forth also has 3k members now, which isn't too shabby (even though a mere blip in the greater picture, but still...)
Is some of this due to more people getting fed up with heaviness of existing mainstream langs & tooling, looking for lighter alternatives? I don't know. Maybe more people are finding their way to functional programming (incl. getting pre-exposed to REPLs and their life-changing impact/discovery of interactive dev processes) and from there taking the smaller step to explore concatenative/stack-based langs...? 🤷‍♂️
Enough hypothesizing — it's just all _very_ exciting to watch how this is developing and hopefully new ideas & learnings from other langs/envs finding their way into Forth-lands!
“…Forth does it differently. There is no syntax, no redundancy, no typing. There are no errors that can be detected. …there are no parentheses. No indentation. No hooks, no compatibility. …No files. No operating system.” — Chuck Moore
Ps2. Shameless plug, if you want to try out a Forth in the browser, check out my VM/REPL (incl. screen casts, Forth shaders/webaudio examples): https://thi.ng/charlie
I would apologize for posting what at first appears to be another "tech toot"...but since I churned out almost 40 drawings for this talk on the Forth programming language, I don't feel bad about it at all. Here's the slides:
