Why Forth? (programming language)

A brief rationale for and introduction to using Forth.

Check out these pages shown at the end of presentation for more information:

Recorded with OBS Studio and edited with OpenShot Video Editor.

[TimHayward]

Everyone talks about the stack but one of the really clever components is the dictionary and how it is used for variables, functions, overloading, compiling, scoping, etc. I hope your next video will cover that and the input stream.

[basicforge]

Forth is the first structured language I learned after I spent a few years with BASIC. I accidentally stumbled across Starting Forth in the public library and since I already had several years of HP calculator programming under my belt I found it very comfortable to learn. With that book and the excellent following Thinking Forth I was ready for a career in software development.

[jondeere]

Forth language was used in Voyager. Thinking Forth and Starting Forth are available on line as PDF files. Forth has also been used as a pre-processor.

I had a hard time trying to get the grasp of Forth and what made it much easier was to understand the "threaded code" model and how "The Dictionary" is implemented.
(Interestingly, the Forht Wikipedia page is very nice.)

[whstark]

Forth Interest group has allot of resource's, I belonged to in back in the 70 tie's and had it running on my CPM operating z80 system, with 8" DMA controller drives DT8's (controller and 2 drives were $1500 back then but really fast) - The IMSAI S100 VIO memory mapped video was great, also the MIO IO board, banked 256K ram also running a ram drive.

[finndriver]

I'm inspired! I've always enjoyed stack programming and RPN since my PostScript days, I never thought to try Forth, many thanks

[tectopic]

For me it’s mostly the ease of factoring and structure.

[GianmarioScotti]

A nice presentation of the advantages of Forth, but I am even more thrilled by the info in the video description. Thank you, Abraham!

[lambda]

Forth is great. Fortress and Factor are other cool stack languages to check out if you're interested in them!

[lorensims]

Nice overview and argument in favor. I discovered Forth with fig-Forth on my Atari800 in 1985. It was a revelation!
I have since tinkered with Yerk (a Forth system) on my Mac Performa in the mid-'90s just after my graphic design teacher taught us that PostScript is, in fact, a page description 'language' by having us write programs in it. I was delighted to see that it's basically Forth!!
I wasn't really surprised to find so little information on YouTube, but I was delighted to find your informative video.
I just came from that hackaday.com site before I cam here!
Thanks so much for the info in the description!!

[KP]

Awesome presentation! I've been trying to get into forth and noticed a lack of youtube videos as well. Appreciate the resources

[mrenrollment]

: Beep Forth love if honk then;
I used Forth to design digital oscopes back in the 80's on 2905 bite slice machine.
Love'd it.
I have been considering writing FORTH in C for micros. Probably C.H.Ting's F79 or 83.
I see Mecrisp Forth is available but I don't know the history of it.
People get carried away with 'improvements' which I think get beyond the simplicity of the
basic language.

[geromiuiboxz]

🇨🇱
Being a FORTH fan since the 70's, I enjoyed your video with a dose of nostalgia 😀
Perhaps you should have mentioned (honored) it's creator genius Chuck Moore, who "invented" it back in 1968.
Saludos desde 🇨🇱

[gustinian]

Forth is just so expressive and yet refreshingly simple. It is deplorable that it is not better known (although a secret weapon is best kept secret...)
In comparison with other prevalent languages (which got adopted by chance more often than not from what I can tell) it is almost as if the priestly class (i.e. programmers) were trying to deliberately obfuscate programming, to keep the black box unknowable. It is rare in the age of colossal operating systems and plug and play libraries built on layers of dependencies, to have a system that is fully comprehensible from top to bottom.
The Mecrisp Stellaris Forth for ARM Cortex is particularly recommended.

[pauldusa]

1989 was my FORTH timeline. I found one of my forth CPU, Ram, EEPROM, latch to control the Address. The Old days before Embedded microcontrollers we’re invented. The fun days

[heedmywarning]

I have a FORTH programming tape for the Model 100 and NEC 8201a computers. Now I know what it's for.

[marswatcher]

You should get yourself a Udamonic Scamp3 embedded computer. It boots into Forth as its native environment. Highly recommended!

[TheKetsa]

FORTH is sadly under-represented on the web. Hard to even find an intro.

[zorgfr]

i discovered Forth in the 80's on ORIC ATMOS Computer.
It was Forth-F83 version. 🥰

[briandenley]

As a huge RPN fan, I really wanted to like Forth but I find the available texts on the language to be awful! Does anyone know of a good text for Forth? I know several programming languages but many good texts are available for them.