[transfire]

IDK. They all look a little atrocious to me.

But readability has a lot to do with what you are used to.

The only exception might be FORTH. A very well written FORTH implementation (and I mean very well written) probably would be fairly readable to anyone — at least at the higher levels of abstraction.

[TruffleLabs]

And Forth was invented by Charles Moore while at NRAO!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_H._Moore?wprov=sfti1#E...

"In 1968, while employed at the United States National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO), Moore invented the initial version of the Forth language to help control radio telescopes."

[macintux]

W. Richard Stevens wrote a Forth manual for Kitt Peak in the 70s. Now I’m curious how many observatories used the language.

[TruffleLabs]

This has some great background on Forth's history and use at observatories.

"The evolution of Forth | History of programming languages---II" - https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/234286.1057832

[jaskerr]

I know of one: the U.S. Naval Observatory near Flagstaff, Arizona. I lived in Flagstaff in 1979. I knew the astronomer and visited him at the observatory at night. He showed me a terminal running Forth that could control the telescope.

I’m sure there were many other sites.

[xelxebar]

I'll bite. Are you able to share any FORTH code/repos that hit that aesthetic spot for you?

[inkyoto]

That FORTH cannot muster the decency to include a simple «U» in its name rather scuppers any hope of an aesthetic parley before the tea’s even been poured.

Joking aside, FORTH’s reliance on the stack as virtually its only data structure – along with its insistence on applying it to everything and everyone – is simply too impractical outside a few niche areas, such as low-level hardware programming or document rendering (hello, PostScript!). I have no doubt a JSON parser in FORTH will emerge as part of Advent of Code 2038, but I can’t imagine it will inspire hesitating potential converts to embrace the language with open arms.

[skydhash]

I’ve not used FORTH, but I learned UIUA last year which has the stack paradigm. You just have to be more careful about your function design and the order of application. I was using emacs and there were annotations by the language server that said how many items you’re taking from the stack and how many will stay behind.

[anthk]

Forth user here (Eforth Subleq/PFE). Scheme is not that bad. Haskell, OTOH, and any ML language, looks very difficult to me.