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Comment by smackeyacky | Hacker News Reader

Ah, the holy trinity of languages: Forth, Smalltalk and Lisp. The BMW Isetta, NSU Ro80 and Citroen SM of the programming world. Sure you'd love to own all three but nobody is taking a business road trip in any of them.

However the Forth story is fascinating its well worth reading the entire article.

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I like your holy trinity quip. :)

It's interesting that most people acknowledge that each of these languages have some novel insight into program development and yet they tend to be not part of the mainstream.

Is it because the concepts they introduced where just migrated into existing languages and sub-systems? Functions, lists, OOP and stack based virtual machines are common place now.

I don't think there is a VM in the mainstream that uses the Data/Return stack Forth architecture but I could be wrong.

I think they all died for different reasons. Forth was trying to solve a problem that no longer really exists (need for a tiny self contained system on novel hardware). This is now C compilers. Lisp I haven't had much to do with but its proponents are their own worst enemies. I did a lot of work with Smalltalk and basically other environments just got better without the problems you get deploying smalltalk images. Nostalgia is fun but things like .NET core are so good now you can build and deploy systems with virtually no friction using whatever paradigm you are comfortable with.

PostScript is a stack based language like Forth but things like NeWS that were based on it never really took off.

Forth doesn't really solve the same problem as C. It's more like a minimal self-contained interpreter/VM, and it can still be useful as such.

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