An Engineer's Journey with Forth: From Fascination to Abandonment

This blog post recounts an engineer's experience learning and using the Forth programming language. Initially captivated by Forth's brevity and extensibility, the author delved into the source code of pForth, marveling at its compile-time self-modifying capabilities. However, in real-world projects, the author found Forth more suitable for number crunching, struggling with tasks like text processing. While designing a custom hardware embedded system, the author leveraged Forth to design the system's CPU instruction set, but ultimately found C more efficient and abandoned Forth. The author concludes that Forth is ideal for minimalist engineers seeking extreme efficiency, while he himself prefers a more pragmatic approach, opting for more widely used languages.