Ah brings back the days! Once upon a time I did most of my programming in a Forth like language we called "Fifth".<p>Eclipse today is almost bringing Java development to the point that it is sort of as productive as the Environment we built for Forth that ran on 20 Mhz PCs with 16 Megs of memory.<p>Almost.<p>What did we have?<p>Lazy compilation (functions compiled as needed rather than making us wait for a full compile) which doesn't exist today for Java, unless you count JIT (which honestly is a different concept).<p>Hot code replacement (that worked every time rather than the "sometimes works" with Eclipse).<p>Immediate functions for implementing all sorts of functionality algorithmically at compile time instead of writing code generators and initialization functions.<p>Instant initialization (a side effect of Immediate functions). Our Postscript Interpreter booted in milliseconds on a 16 Mhz 68000 as compared to the 1 or 2 minutes for the Apple Lazerwriter.<p>Hot key navigation -- Eclipse is about on par.<p>Online help -- Eclipse has a bit nicer interface, but ours was pretty near "Wiki Easy" to develop and extend and available on a key stroke.<p>Graphical interfaces and windows, Syntax completion, Syntax highlighting... All ideas that came later. All we had was character graphics, but we did great stuff with that.<p>Anyway, Thanks for the trip down memory lane. I miss programming right against the metal, but I also don't miss it too!
If someone is looking for a great forth tutorial/book, one of the best is "Thinking Forth" by Brodie. Now available as an open project:
<a href="http://thinking-forth.sourceforge.net/" rel="nofollow">http://thinking-forth.sourceforge.net/</a>
If you want an even more portable Forth environment, check out Amforth (<a href="http://amforth.sourceforge.net/" rel="nofollow">http://amforth.sourceforge.net/</a>) or Fignition (<a href="http://sites.google.com/site/libby8dev/fignition" rel="nofollow">http://sites.google.com/site/libby8dev/fignition</a>).
Once you've tried one version of Forth, you've tried one version of Forth. :)<p>Seriously, last time I used Forth was using a New Micros board that ran IsoMax, a great language for state machines.
Always wanted to try this out:<p><a href="http://www.phrack.org/issues.html?issue=53&id=9" rel="nofollow">http://www.phrack.org/issues.html?issue=53&id=9</a>