[evincarofautumn]

It’s very fun as low-level languages go. I like gforth[1]. If you want modern high-level languages in the same family, look into “concatenative programming”. In particular, Factor[2] is a cool Smalltalk-like object-oriented concatenative language with a nice interactive environment. It’s still under somewhat active development, but they could really use more users to drive progress.

Concatenative programming exposes you to a new style of thinking—IMO it’s the perfect marriage of imperative and functional programming, because you can reason about your code either way: as a “pipeline” composition of functions, or as a sequence of imperative operations on the data stack. In terms of PL theory they have a bunch of elegant algebraic properties too.

[1]: https://www.gnu.org/software/gforth/

[2]: http://factorcode.org/

[JadeNB]

Is Factor still being maintained? I seem to remember that the 0.97 release came out some years ago, and it's worrisome (in terms of investment of time in learning a new language) to think it might be frozen pre-1.0 release.

[evincarofautumn]

Yeah, there’s still a steady trickle of maintenance work by a couple of guys. The latest commits were just a couple weeks ago. It’s just that no one has taken the time to put together an official release lately, and it seems like calling it 1.0 has sorta been “somebody else’s problem” for a while now, partly because the original author is no longer involved. Like I said, I think what they really need is motivated early adopter–type users to provide an incentive to improve it.

It seems to be useful & stable enough for real work, although I have an ulterior motive as well. I work on Kitten, a statically typed concatenative language (Factor : Smalltalk/Lisp :: Kitten : OCaml/C), and I’m hoping to (finally) get out an initial release soon. So I have an incentive to tell people to use Factor, to get more people interested in the paradigm so they go seeking other offerings if they find it interesting/useful but Factor isn’t a good fit.

[xelxebar]

Since you bring up concatenative programming in general, I recently came across https://concatenative.org and think some people here might like it.

[evincarofautumn]

There’s also an IRC channel[1] and I’m the mod of a subreddit[2] for people interested in the paradigm. They both have fairly low/intermittent traffic but there’s a small group of dedicated people, some programming in Factor, several (myself included) working on their own languages.

[1]: irc://freenode.net/#concatenative

[2]: https://www.reddit.com/r/concatenative