[retrocryptid]

My guess as to why people write their own forths is:

a. It's easy compared to writing a C complier (or even a half-way feature rich BASIC interpreter.)

b. The easiest way to understand some features of FORTH (like tick and var and colon) is to simply re-implement them.

So if you've already reimplemented half of the language, it's easier to reimplement the rest of it than to internalize how someone else's FORTH works.

I worked on a somewhat large FORTH project in the late 80s. My quip was: "The cool thing about FORTH is that it's so easy to extend the outer interpreter to make a DSL. The bad news is that someone on your project already has."

[ttgurney]

Good thoughts, thanks. This mirrors my own experience. The whole thing did seem very approachable to me. Pretty sure we had to implement a FORTH in a programming languages course I took back in college as well, so I had that basic familiarity with it.

Actually writing FORTH programs, on the other hand, is for me a real brain-bender. It seems to require a very different kind of thinking than does programming in C (for example).

[iratewizard]

> It seems to require a very different kind of thinking than does programming in C

That's the beauty of it. The more exposure you get to these kinds of different paradigms, the further you advance your craft. It all transitions to whatever you're working on and helps you better speak the fundamental computer language.