I have several decades of programming experience and would never choose Lisp, unless for funny one pagers.
Programming language ergonomics matter and there is a reason why Lisp has so little adoption even after a half a century.
Programming language ergonomics matter and there is a reason why Lisp has so little adoption even after a half a century.
I could probably include Forth as a scripting language in a bigger app, but that app is probably going to want more complex variables than machine word size ints, and fixed-length strings. So, oh dear, Forth's not a great fit for that, and everyone just uses Lua anyway, so Lua it is.
Which is a pity, because I like Forth, and I used to to create possibly the nerdiest project on Github. I like Forth a lot, and I'd encourage anyone curious about how you get from "chunk of thinking sand and copper" to "thing I can type commands in" to have a crack at it - it's easy enough to implement your own, just to see how it's done.
But I don't expect anyone else to jump up and like it too, just because I said it's cool.
Well, maybe one or two of you will?
It boots off a floppy disk, so it was really just a case of working out where in the ROM and OS disassembly the entry points were, and making it all fit around the assumptions the ROM makes.
This allowed me to make up a diagnostics disk to check the RAM (a whopping 128kB of sample RAM) and IO are working.
https://gordonjcp.github.io/miragetools/
Now I wouldn't place a bet on it being the nerdiest project on Github, but I suspect it's well up there.