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by capableweb 2276 days ago
Of course! Have friends who work with it on a daily basis. My comment was mostly tongue in cheek, didn't mean that Forth is completely dead. Usually when seeing Forth though, it's bit older stuff than say PHP. My friends for example, are stuck trying to refactor very old code, written in Forth.

Didn't mean no harm :)
2 comments
macintux 2276 days ago
What do your friends do with it? It’s very high on my priority list for new languages to learn, and finding a job with it someday would be very interesting.
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carapace 2276 days ago
Be sure to read "Thinking Forth". Even if you don't wind up doing a lot with Forth it will still improve your abilities as a programmer.

http://thinking-forth.sourceforge.net/

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macintux 2275 days ago
It's in my pile o' papers. I've broken it out a couple of times but haven't gotten far yet.
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capableweb 2276 days ago
One set work with maintaining old software for a national bank and the other set work with software for a huge international company that are not IT focused but ended up with software and firmware that just been ticking along since forever.

I'm not jealous and don't think I would bear working like that every day for months. Take a hard look and try to build software with Forth before you try to use it professionally.

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exikyut 2274 days ago
There's a reasonable number of people out there who would be very interested in a disambiguation of scale, architecture, implementational wins/shortcomings, etc, about these two cases.

Codebase size? Entropic/organizational complexity? Word style? Environment (custom/standard)? Standard(s) used? Ease of debugging? Testing methodology used?

I most definitely am not literally asking for answers to this set of questions (considering the cases of a bank and an industry that presumably doesn't want to be known for its software) - I guess I'm just being exact in the gist of my curiosity :)

The only interesting illustrative example I can provide is that Mattel once used Forth for its toys (quoting previous times I mentioned this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21823216, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17755287)

I don't know of any recent case studies.

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BubRoss 2276 days ago
You might want to actually use it first before thinking you want to use it more. Forth is simple because it is primitive and passes the cognitive load on to you.
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bear8642 2276 days ago
None taken - agree Forth's slightly older language.
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