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Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

Forth is no different from other languages in that you can write good code and bad code in it. The 'Forth way' is not always intuitive and in that it fails from the purpose of being a language friendly to newcomers, it's a bit like being dumped on someone else's farm without power, water or sewage and a pile of tools and raw materials for you to use.

Taking a step down like that when coming from a modern environment is really hard. But when looked at from the other direction, as a step up from assembler and a way to become much more productive while at the same time reducing the amount of space bugs have to hide in it makes a lot more sense.

But in the present day it's no longer very useful unless you are doing something embedded or if you want to entertain yourself with an eternal match of code golf.

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Forth IS different in one way, from most other languages. The syntax doesn't mark which parameters are being passed to which functions. In C for example you have parentheses and commas that provide that information to the reader. The marking of parameters-to-functions helps most readers read a program and determine its meaning.

In some cases it doesn't matter which parameters are going to which functions, and the reader can get a sense or enough of a sense, from the choices of names the programmer made. You can get by without knowing.

But in many cases it is vital to know which parameters are being passed to which subroutine, in order to understand an algorithm. For most people, having to puzzle and re-puzzle this out while the program is being studied is too much extra work or extra ambiguity, or, they just don't buy having to put up with it, given the ready alternatives.

Those specific markings -- parentheses around function calls -- makes a big difference in readability overall.

I've often thought about an editor for a stack/concatenative language that makes the arity of words clearer. like when you select a word it highlights which of the previous words in the definition it's consuming.

I don't know if it would work for forth - too low level - but for something like Factor I could see it being really useful.

I’m surprised this is the only reference to Factor (http://factorcode.org).

I think the important distinction-- and the reason that I never got very far in Forth myself-- is that with Forth, you don't have the pile of tools and raw materials, but instead a forge and some ingots of various metals. You really do often end up rebuilding even things you'd normally consider simple library functions in most other languages.

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