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Yeah, it's a common observation that more people have written their own Forth than have written useful programs in any Forth, whether their own or others'. Part of the reason is that Forth is a low-level language like C, which makes it easier to implement, and harder to write programs in, than, say, Python or Rust. But, although there are considerably more C compilers out there than Python implementations, C doesn't suffer from this to nearly the same extent. I'm no expert in Forth (though of course I've written a few quasi-Forths of my own) but I suspect that what's happening here is that, nowadays, the advantages of Forth over C or assembly just aren't great enough to counterbalance the disadvantages of using a minority language (like worse documentation, FFI, libraries, answers on Stack Overflow). Also, Forth compilers typically produce worse code than C compilers or assembly programmers, which rules it out for a lot of the applications where using a low-level language would be most tempting. That is, itself, a category that is smaller every year, in relative terms anyway. The difficulty gets made worse by the conceited bullshit discourse about how Forth programmers are an elite distinguished by their superior intelligence, a story I sometimes hear even from people who don't write Forth. |