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.
