[richard_todd]

I tried Forth for the first time three years ago, and it's been a kind of guilty pleasure ever since. Even though I can write a program about 3x as quickly in a mainstream language, I sometimes reach for Forth because I think it's so much fun. People don't often mention this aspect of it. There's something satisfying -- in the same way that proving a theorem or solving a riddle is satisfying -- about finding a minimal way to coordinate the data flow on the stack. And, no matter how well you do, it seems you can always stare at it the next day and find a tiny improvement.

When I read Moore's material, I feel like he fell into that positive feedback loop in some kind of pathological way... He keeps rebuilding and rebuilding basically the same CAD hardware/sw system, recreating it simpler and more elegant in his eyes every time. For years and years.

Building a forth system from scratch really is an eye-opener... Many have written about how strange and beautiful it is to take your base language and then add the ability to make comments and perform if-then control flow from inside the language. You build it up from nothing but it's a functioning language/interpreter the whole time. Very cool.