5 ms·

Kinda surprised to not see Forth listed.

by mud_dauber 1y ago

drweevil 1y ago
Or Lisp. Lisp is definitely not dead, but was definitely very influential.
- bitwize 1y ago
  Imho Lisp is deader than COBOL. Especially now that we've learned you can do the really hard and interesting bits of AI with high-performance number crunching in C++ and CUDA.
  - kstrauser 1y ago
    I wrote Lisp this morning to make Emacs do a thing. In other venues, people use Lisp to script AutoCAD. Lisp isn't as widely used as, say, Python, but it's still something a lot of people touch every single day.
    - lucasoshiro 1y ago
      And Clojure
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- tempaway43563 1y ago
  The article does touch on that: "COBOL was one of the four “mother” languages, along with ALGOL, FORTRAN, and LISP."
duskwuff 1y ago
Forth was neat, but it was a bit of an evolutionary dead end. I'm not aware of any significant concepts from Forth which were adopted by other, later programming languages.
- ks2048 1y ago
  PostScript
  - microtherion 1y ago
    The only thing PostScript and Forth have in common is RPN. Other than that, they are very different in philosophy - Forth is very bit banging, close to the metal, while PostScript is much more symbol oriented and high level.
    - ks2048 1y ago
      That's true, PostScript is much higher-level and feels like a stack-based LISP. But, saying they just have RPN in common makes it seem like a small choice about the syntax - instead of a whole stack-oriented approach, which affects everything.
      - microtherion 1y ago
        Well, yes, the stack oriented approach does matter. But even there, there are big differences with Forth having a user accessible return stack, which is implicit in PostScript, while PostScript has an explicit dictionary stack, which exists only in a very primitive form in Forth.
- tengwar2 1y ago
  RPL (Reverse Polish Lisp, a high level language for HP calculators) possibly drew on it a bit, though the main antecedents are RPN and Lisp, and possibly Poplog (a Poplog guru was at HP at the time, but I don't know if he contributed).
- xmcqdpt2 1y ago
  Did Forth inspire the stack-based VMs of python and java? I don't know about that part of CS history well, but a very large proportion of all code runs on stack based byte code interpreters.

Kinda surprised to not see Forth listed.

drweevil 1y ago

Or Lisp. Lisp is definitely not dead, but was definitely very influential.

bitwize 1y ago
Imho Lisp is deader than COBOL. Especially now that we've learned you can do the really hard and interesting bits of AI with high-performance number crunching in C++ and CUDA.
- kstrauser 1y ago
  I wrote Lisp this morning to make Emacs do a thing. In other venues, people use Lisp to script AutoCAD. Lisp isn't as widely used as, say, Python, but it's still something a lot of people touch every single day.
  - lucasoshiro 1y ago
    And Clojure
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
tempaway43563 1y ago
The article does touch on that: "COBOL was one of the four “mother” languages, along with ALGOL, FORTRAN, and LISP."

duskwuff 1y ago

Forth was neat, but it was a bit of an evolutionary dead end. I'm not aware of any significant concepts from Forth which were adopted by other, later programming languages.

ks2048 1y ago
PostScript
- microtherion 1y ago
  The only thing PostScript and Forth have in common is RPN. Other than that, they are very different in philosophy - Forth is very bit banging, close to the metal, while PostScript is much more symbol oriented and high level.
  - ks2048 1y ago
    That's true, PostScript is much higher-level and feels like a stack-based LISP. But, saying they just have RPN in common makes it seem like a small choice about the syntax - instead of a whole stack-oriented approach, which affects everything.
    - microtherion 1y ago
      Well, yes, the stack oriented approach does matter. But even there, there are big differences with Forth having a user accessible return stack, which is implicit in PostScript, while PostScript has an explicit dictionary stack, which exists only in a very primitive form in Forth.
tengwar2 1y ago
RPL (Reverse Polish Lisp, a high level language for HP calculators) possibly drew on it a bit, though the main antecedents are RPN and Lisp, and possibly Poplog (a Poplog guru was at HP at the time, but I don't know if he contributed).
xmcqdpt2 1y ago
Did Forth inspire the stack-based VMs of python and java? I don't know about that part of CS history well, but a very large proportion of all code runs on stack based byte code interpreters.