Forth: The programming language that writes itself

Summary

Forth: The programming language that writes itself: The Web Page Charles H. Moore and the pursuit of simplicity. Author: Dave Gauer Created: 2023-02-02 Updated: 2024-12-22 Note: This page is my personal journey to discover Forth and put it in the context of computing history. It is adapted from my slides for a short talk. I've done everything in my power to make this page scale up and down for various screen sizes. I welcome suggestions and corrections for both the content and display of this page. Here's my contact page. The Legend When I was a wee programmer, I would sit around the virtual Usenet campfires listening to the tall tales and legends of the elders. In the 1990s, Usenet newsgroups (wikipedia.org) were where it was at. For example, Linus Torvalds's initial announcement of Linux was to comp.os.minix in 1991. The comp.* (wikipedia.org) groups and particularly comp.lang.* were great places to learn about and discuss programming. By the time I got there in the late 90s, Perl was a pretty hot topic, especially as it took a dominant role in the early Web as the dynamic page and form processing programming language via CGI (wikipedia.org). There were programming resources on the Web, but nothing like what's available now! To actually learn to program, I bought books, and still do. Usenet was where the community and folklore lived. (The "Easter egg" in this drawing is alt.religion.kibology, which should get a chuckle from old timers. The rest of you can look it up.) I learned about magical languages with lots of (((((parenthesis))))). Sharp-eyed Lisp-lovers and other mutants will perhaps recognize this thing as the Y combinator expressed with lambdas. The only time I understood this was when I completed the book The Little Schemer by Friedman and Felliesen, which walks you through creating it for yourself. It is a magical book and I implore you to try it. I listened, wide-eyed, to true tech tales like The Story of Mel (foldoc.org). Mel was real and the Royal McB...