I consider Forth to be a dead language, at least in the same sense that Latin is a dead language – i.e. nobody uses it in daily life anymore. I now only use it and write about it in the context of computational thinking. Forth may be a dead language, but that doesn’t preclude it from being vibrantly important. If you don’t like irony, you’re reading the wrong blog.
Forth was developed for over a decade by Charles (Chuck) Moore before being written down formally in 1970. Moore was a radio telescope guy at the start. He needed an expressive, helpful computer language for his own work, much as Newton needed calculus. The story is best told in the book: “FORTH – The Early Years”.
What makes Forth important is just that – it was created to serve as a computational assistant. Using it is very conversational and immersive. One doesn’t think for an hour, consult authority and standards, edit for an hour, then compile, then test, then go for lunch (or go home), etc. There is a non-stop dialectic, a friendly and thoughtful argument, with you handling the imagination and it handling the bits and bytes.
And a program emerges.
I started using Forth in the late 1970s. Using it, I learned binary and hexadecimal numbers and arithmetic, register manipulation (the main task of a CPU), memory manipulation (the main task of a computer), and many concepts and paradigms of programming. These included imperative (states, flow control), functional (stateless, mathematical), object oriented (encapsulation, re-use), factoring, concatenative, declarative (mostly through a Prolog written in Forth), machine control, etc, etc,. I read several books and many articles, but the real learning happened by doing. What’s key here is the fact that I’ve never been a great programmer (very good, but never great). Anyone can gain tremendous benefit from spending even a few hours learning Forth. It enables one to invent an ad hoc language to solve an ad hoc problem. It’s not magic and other worldly like Excalibur. It’s more like an early hominid’s stone tool – it teaches one to think, especially to think about the next tool.
My Forth days are long in the past. Today, I write mainly in Haskell, Assembler, Prolog, and English. For database work, I use SQL, key-value stores, and JSON. Whenever I think about any problem, I think computationally. I’ve spent almost four decades thinking in Forth.
I intend to write many posts and maybe even a few articles on Forth, it will be a mainstay of this blog.