On Monday, May 16, 2022 at 9:38:16 AM UTC+2, dxforth wrote:
My introduction to Forth was a work colleague telling me about a new language he'd discovered. I don't recall the context other than he was quite excited by it. He was across everything microcomputers and his enthusiasm impressed me enough that I bought a cheap implementation. It wasn't love at first sight but a beginning.
I'd already mastered Basic, Pascal and Z80 assembly and wanted to do another language. It cost me $40, but I got Artic Forth - which BTW is also featured in the short.
While most languages left me about 20K (or even less) to play with, Forth got me a
whopping 32K (Abersoft forth ate another 6K or 8K for its "RAM drive").
I didn't understand too much of it, so I spend a whopping $150 on textbooks to learn
it. It was fun. I also patched the thing to work with the Betadrive - and then the system
exploded! By reading and writing blocks to disk, this thing became a viable system -
doing things far beyond the ZX Spectrum's capabilities.
Even though the Beta couldn't (in its first iteration) open a file and do consecutive reads
or writes to it, that wasn't a problem when doing blocks. You filled up a block with data,
updated it and then write it to disk and open up another block. Although disabled, I
reenabled getting FULL error messages from disk.
I even rewrote some string utilities published in Vijgeblad by Marcel Hendrix in
assembly, smudged the stuff and got blindingly fast string processing. So yeah, some assembly required, but this thing really delivered.
But then came Forth-83 and F83. And not to diminish the quality or the effort of
that product, but I just didn't like it. So I went Turbo C v2 (which I still use for some
applications).
That was, until the point, an odd 5 years later, when I had accumulated enough skills
to make the Forth I wanted - which became 4tH. And that was full circle. Because I've
done very little development in C itself. With 4tH I can take on tasks that would baffle
me when I had to do them in I - like the 4tH preprocessor; or even a line editor.
So the last 25 years I've done almost all my development in Forth. Of course there is
the fun of doing things "in your own tool", but nowadays - with a vast library of handy stuff -
choosing C above 4tH simply seems madness to me.
Now, why should I choose 4tH above Python - well, first of all, I think Python is a particularly
horrible language. I need a horrible blob of stuff on my computer. If you wanna make a
standalone executable, you have to turn it using Pyinstaller in another horrible blob.
Using 4tH I get a neat little native, standalone executable - which I can compile by just calling
doing "make".
If I got to run it across multiple platforms, all I got to do is to distribute an even smaller
.HX bytecode file. I've done that in a professional environment as well. It's quite painless -
even the dumbest operator can do it.
Now of course, there are millions of other reasons, tools and workarounds - and I'm open
to hear them - but the bottom line is - it has very well worked for me and my clients.
I have to note in this regard that I'm not a developer by profession (not anymore). I just solve
stuff that (obviously) nobody else is able to solve in that time frame.
Hans Bezemer
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