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Prediction: someone will make a reverse polish notation skill for interacting with claude claiming all sorts of things, like caveman, turn into another markdown as a service company, and make the news.
See Self's "dynamic deoptimization", where it constructs a virtual return stack on demand that you would have had, were it not for the JIT compiler's agressive inlining.
Debugging Optimized Code with Dynamic Deoptimization, by Urs Hölzle, Craig Chambers, and David Ungar:
The Forth (and Lisp) posts will continue until the entire HN population has been converted.
I am glad that this forum that has mostly been colonized by the ‘normies’ still manages to keep these two languages in the conversation, capturing curious passersby with their exotic allure. In every post you see new prey with the comments like ‘I keep reading about Lisp and I still don’t get why it’s popular. All I see is parentheses. Can anybody explain?’
I fear the day HN closes is the day those languages will die.
I think there are phases where it becomes more popular, if some discussion topically references FORTH, or Lisp, you know that within a few hours other people will read them and make submissions on the same theme.
It's nice.
As for me I'll almost blindly vote up anything that references FORTH because I love implementing it. I don't use it. Few people do these days, but writing toy implementations is satisfying, for sure.
(I do use Lisp, and within the past month posted my own lisp compiler here. A few votes and a brief bit of commentary which is about all it deserved. But I like seeing other people's approaches and I suspect that's why it got the minimal attention it did.)
It's archaic, powerful, expressive, compact. I'd describe it as an interactive macro-assembler on steroids. What's not to like?
But it's different. Certainly not for everyone (imho that makes it even more interesting). So yeah, shouldn't hurt the HN audience to pop by now & then.
A different way to say the same: in forth, words get pushed on the stack, and popped from the stack by words that take arguments:
code stack
I Forth love
Forth love I
love I
Forth
; love presumably pops
; subject, object args
; from stack - and does something
; perhaps prints as side effect
Even oddly more pedantically, that's the operand stack, not to be confused with the separate return stack. >R and R> move values between the two stacks.
On the other hand, PostScript also has a dictionary stack, which you can use to implement a Smalltalk-like object oriented programming system. And its data types and executable code are basically polymorphic homoiconic JSON (like Lisp), not raw untyped bytes like FORTH.
0: https://hackertimes.com/user?id=DonHopkins
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