Stop Writing Dead Programs (Transcript)

• gtoolkit

  22 1,042 9.6 Smalltalk

  Glamorous Toolkit is the Moldable Development environment. It empowers you to make systems explainable through experiences tailored for each problem.

  

• clerk

  22 1,697 8.5 Clojure

  ⚡️ Moldable Live Programming for Clojure

  

• InfluxDB

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• enso

  83 7,286 9.9 Scala

  Hybrid visual and textual functional programming.

  

• reagent

  41 4,716 1.1 Clojure

  A minimalistic ClojureScript interface to React.js

  

Fulcro (a library for Clojure/ClojureScript web applications ) has a way of doing this, and I'm sure it's not unique in this aspect: I just don't do enough work in this space to be familiar with the other offerings. This type of feature is valued in the Clojure community, so I wouldn't be surprised if reagent has something like this as well. And this type of thing isn't unique to Clojure, either.

* https://book.fulcrologic.com/#_install_fulcro_inspect

* https://reagent-project.github.io

• pharo

  18 1,140 10.0 Smalltalk

  Pharo is a dynamic reflective pure object-oriented language supporting live programming inspired by Smalltalk.

  

https://github.com/pharo-project/pharo/blob/Pharo11/src/Anno...

(random class selected)

It's not that human unfriendly, if you know Smalltalk (which is not a terribly hard thing to learn). But you also wouldn't interact with it in that form but rather inside of Pharo and using its class browser.

• devtools

  44 651 9.8 TypeScript

  Replay.io DevTools (by replayio)

  

• stoneknifeforth

  13 405 0.0 Forth

  a tiny self-hosted Forth implementation

I've done all these things (except designing the hardware) and I agree that it can be very painful. I did some of them in 02008, for example: https://github.com/kragen/stoneknifeforth

The thing is, though, you can also not do all those things. You can use variables, and they don't even have to be allocated on a stack (unless you're writing a recursive function, which you usually aren't), and all the NIP TUCK ROT goes away, and with it all the Memory Championship tricks. You can test each definition interactively as you write it, and then the fact that the language is absurdly error-prone hardly matters. You can use metaprogramming so that your code is as DRY as a nun's pochola. You can use the interactivity of Forth to quickly validate your hypotheses about not just your code but also the hardware in a way you can't do with C. You can do it with GDB, but Forth is a lot faster than GDBscript, but that's not saying much because even Bash is a lot faster than GDBscript.

But Yossi was just using Forth as a programming language, like a C without local variables or type checking, not an embedded operating system. And, as I said, that's really not Forth's strength. Bash and Tcl aren't good programming languages, either. If you try to use Tcl as a substitute for C you will also be very sad. But the way they're used, that isn't that important.

I explained a more limited version of this 12 years ago: https://yosefk.com/blog/my-history-with-forth-stack-machines...

So, I don't think Forth is only useful when you have the freedom to change the problem, though programs in any language do become an awful lot easier when you have that freedom.

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