Introducing Forth poems

15 points by chris-evelyn

AndyKluger

I appreciate stack visualizations like this, and I’d love to automate them to demo Factor functions. But despite the “stack-ness” of the vertical orientation, it’s much clearer to me when the “top” is to the right and the “bottom” to the left.

I eagerly await the new Forth IDE, in case it can inspire improvements in the Factor listener or language server.

Thanks for posting!

nemin

I’m looking forward to the next episode, but frankly from this little, I’m not sure I share her enthusiasm for this particular algorithm. Don’t get me wrong, I respect Forth a lot as a language:

JonesForth or the newer NasmJF are absolutely eye-opening to read if you’re a developer who both kinda understands how Assembly works and how higher-level code works, but not quite how one becomes the other,
it is also an impressive endeavor in reducing syntax to its very extremes, with pretty much “spaces being the only keywords”,
and one also shouldn’t forget the fact, that Forth isn’t some esolang or toy or whatever, it was used for very serious science with great success.

But when I looked at the code in this video, my only real reaction was “Yeah, this is pretty elegant.” Which is absolutely a positive thing, but I’ve seen elegant code in quite a few languages, many of which were far more mundane than Forth.

For me, JonesForth itself is poetic, it crosses the boundary between hardware and software. SICP’s metacircular-evaluator is poetic, it unshackles the language from itself. Hell, even something of far lower stakes, like the Parser Combinator functional pearl is poetic, because it encapsulates a very human way of how one would go about parsing text in a very elegant abstraction.

Of course, I’m not being entirely fair to the creator of the video. All the projects mentioned above go leagues beyond calculating powers, but I just kind of felt like this wasn’t really a good ‘hook’ in the storytelling sense. If I had absolutely zero previous experience with Forth, this would’ve been likely not enough to really pique my interest.

chris-evelyn

I liked the program. Small enough to be easily understood, complex enough to show the structure of Forth and the connection to the larger environment (ie defining a word).
eyesinthefire

it was used for very serious science with great success.

and still is! Each of the sensors in the IceCube Neutrino Observatory has a Forth (or at the very least, Forth-like) interactive boot/recovery environment.