Why Forth? (programming language) 

Everyone talks about the stack but one of the really clever components is the dictionary and how it is used for variables, functions, overloading, compiling, scoping, etc. I hope your next video will cover that and the input stream.

Forth is the first structured language I learned after I spent a few years with BASIC. I accidentally stumbled across Starting Forth in the public library and since I already had several years of HP calculator programming under my belt I found it very comfortable to learn. With that book and the excellent following Thinking Forth I was ready for a career in software development.

I had a hard time trying to get the grasp of Forth and what made it much easier was to understand the "threaded code" model and how "The Dictionary" is implemented. (Interestingly, the Forht Wikipedia page is very nice.)

Forth Interest group has allot of resource's, I belonged to in back in the 70 tie's and had it running on my CPM operating z80 system, with 8" DMA controller drives DT8's (controller and 2 drives were $1500 back then but really fast) - The IMSAI S100 VIO memory mapped video was great, also the MIO IO board, banked 256K ram also running a ram drive.

I'm inspired! I've always enjoyed stack programming and RPN since my PostScript days, I never thought to try Forth, many thanks

: Beep Forth love if honk then; I used Forth to design digital oscopes back in the 80's on 2905 bite slice machine. Love'd it. I have been considering writing FORTH in C for micros. Probably C.H.Ting's F79 or 83. I see Mecrisp Forth is available but I don't know the history of it. People get carried away with 'improvements' which I think get beyond the simplicity of the basic language.

A nice presentation of the advantages of Forth, but I am even more thrilled by the info in the video description. Thank you, Abraham!

Nice overview and argument in favor. I discovered Forth with fig-Forth on my Atari800 in 1985. It was a revelation! I have since tinkered with Yerk (a Forth system) on my Mac Performa in the mid-'90s just after my graphic design teacher taught us that PostScript is, in fact, a page description 'language' by having us write programs in it. I was delighted to see that it's basically Forth!! I wasn't really surprised to find so little information on RU-vid, but I was delighted to find your informative video. I just came from that hackaday.com site before I cam here! Thanks so much for the info in the description!!

Forth is great. Fortress and Factor are other cool stack languages to check out if you're interested in them!

🇨🇱 Being a FORTH fan since the 70's, I enjoyed your video with a dose of nostalgia 😀 Perhaps you should have mentioned (honored) it's creator genius Chuck Moore, who "invented" it back in 1968. Saludos desde 🇨🇱

Forth is once again the future

Awesome presentation! I've been trying to get into forth and noticed a lack of youtube videos as well. Appreciate the resources

Forth is just so expressive and yet refreshingly simple. It is deplorable that it is not better known (although a secret weapon is best kept secret...) In comparison with other prevalent languages (which got adopted by chance more often than not from what I can tell) it is almost as if the priestly class (i.e. programmers) were trying to deliberately obfuscate programming, to keep the black box unknowable. It is rare in the age of colossal operating systems and plug and play libraries built on layers of dependencies, to have a system that is fully comprehensible from top to bottom. The Mecrisp Stellaris Forth for ARM Cortex is particularly recommended.

You should get yourself a Udamonic Scamp3 embedded computer. It boots into Forth as its native environment. Highly recommended!

FORTH is sadly under-represented on the web. Hard to even find an intro.

For me it’s mostly the ease of factoring and structure.

I have a FORTH programming tape for the Model 100 and NEC 8201a computers. Now I know what it's for.

1989 was my FORTH timeline. I found one of my forth CPU, Ram, EEPROM, latch to control the Address. The Old days before Embedded microcontrollers we’re invented. The fun days

I really hope you'll get around to the demos, Forth is amazing and I'm especially excited it runs on the 8 bit micros!

I think the only drawback to FORTH is that every programmer uses their own names and definations for some of the common process'. There was figFORTH, 79 FORTH, 83 FORTH. Moving form one version to another required some tinkering some of the FORTH words in PygmiFORTH would need to be altered to respond as expected in another dialect of forth. Every programmer would find a slightly different definanition to complete the same task. The book 'Starting FORTH' ( 79 FORTH ) offers some changes to high level words in whatever version you might be using to keep the results in the different dialects close to what your expecting when trying examples in the book. I use different versions of FORTH on three different processors and there are times when the low level words cause some problems. I still prefer using FORTH.

i discovered Forth in the 80's on ORIC ATMOS Computer. It was Forth-F83 version. 🥰

Good work Abraham ! Congratulations !

Just had this video recommended to me after doing some Googling for Commodore 64 development. I really hate using raw assembly code, but there are a few Forths written for the C64 that appear to get reasonably good performance. I think it might be fun to try and make a C64 game in Forth, since the language is a little more approachable than ASM but a lot faster than BASIC.

It's a nice introduction to the basic Forth concepts. However, it also continues the myth. Yeah, it's easy to draw some stars on the screen - or do some square calculations, but the moment you *REALLY* want to use it for real world applications, people become aware that this "elegant stack" is really a pain in the neck. Two parameters to a word - that's fine, you can do that. But a word with *SIX* parameters quickly deteriorates in what's called "stack acrobatics". Every call, every branch, every loop opens up the possibility of getting stack errors. And with an application of a substantial size, that becomes looking for a needle in a haystack - and some very cumbersome debugging. If you want to apply Forth successfully, you have to adopt an entirely different way of approaching the problem. Where do parameters get in scope. Where do they go out of scope. Sure, you can adopt local variables - but then where is the difference with "classical" languages? Answer: there is none. You're actually building and releasing stack frames - like with any other language. Can it be done? Yeah, sure - but it will takes years of practice and thousands of lines of code. Nowadays I'm able to write Forth programs several factors faster than your average C programmer (and it's more fun). But it has taken me at least a decade to get there. And that is a part of the myth that is rarely communicated.

I‘m so glad you made that joke at @8:16 lol

As a huge RPN fan, I really wanted to like Forth but I find the available texts on the language to be awful! Does anyone know of a good text for Forth? I know several programming languages but many good texts are available for them.

Would been nice to see you program and run some program in Forth.

The word 'polish' in RPN ought to be capitalized, as it is an adjective derived from 'Poland' :)

I'm more used to no rpn languages so the concept of writing even a simple game in forth is daunting. Is there support for sprite movement with joysticks?

hello to everyone I would like to know if the Forth would be good for making 2d video games. thanks!

I had a FORTH programming cartridge for my VIC-20. After learning BASIC, FORTH was a challenge to wrap my mind around.

That was really interesting! Thanks!

"It's like Python and Assembly had a baby"

Nice! Regarding Forth, are you aware of a forth command which displays word definitions? I know there is a command called “words” which displays all the dictionary words, but is there a command to display the code behind each word?

Fantastic !!

is it possible to create a programming language with the programming language forth, if possible, how to create a programming language with forth

I think this would be really cool on the new Raspberry pi pico controllers

The Jupiter Ace cannot use sprites. I managed to program the sprite program for the c64. A lot faster. Damned shame

just when i want to learn forth.. I am pleased actually.. In a academia, I was i advised to use C/C++/Asm for system software development. Any advice

Which implementation to use on Linux?

Come on!!! It is difficult to read. I understand why almost noone uses it. In my humble opinion FORTH is a crap language because of its syntax. It is terrible.

Who's watching in 2023?

Why? Forth is more than 40 years old and all it's good for is endless bragging 😁