I have been reading this write up about Forth: https://ratfactor.com/forth/the_programming_language_that_writes_itself.html What a fascinating language that can still teach us so much.

One thing that Forth taught me is to consider the complexity and difficulty of refactoring: just that you can make a definition from pretty much any sequence of words though then one does wonder about the

: $name $$tokens ;

definition syntax itself. Feels kinda prefixy. I guess there's always Postscript's

/$name {$$tokens} def

.

From my perspective, Forth is just a reminder that we’ve forsaken programming for an over-emphasis on automation of Production Engineering, automation of Premature Optimization and automation of the Waterfall Method. The word “programming” used to encompass a broad range of approaches, but, the word has been repurposed to mean a very narrow approach to solving problems. For example, the fundamental units in Forth are not “functions” and the ideas of parameter passing do not need to be hard-wired into hardware, McCarthy’s Lisp only showed how to build the scaffolding for the FP paradigm on top of reprogrammable electronic machines (in my opinion, Tunney’s Sector Lisp improves upon this by actually emphasizing FP).