Ward Cunningham Interview

Dan Bricklin has a podcast interview with Ward Cunningham. Not many people talk about Forth these days, I mostly get blank stares when I mention it, but Ward talks about it in the same breath as Smalltalk.

I frequently talk about using domain specific languages in development, and in a constrained environment such as embedded systems, building a DSL on a Forth interpreter is easy. I've implemented a Forth-like language in about 300 lines of C code.

*stares blankly*

Posted by Bill Higgins on 2007-02-15

I wrote a Unix clone in less than 300 lines of code :-p

Posted by Randy Charles Morin on 2007-02-16

Funny – the other day, I was chatting on IRC with a friend who was writing a stack-based language (that accidentally ended up looking a lot like Postscript). He hadn’t done such a thing before nor had he ever seen Forth or Postscript, so I was rummaging around my memory for how Forth works and giving him tidbits, contrasting the design decisions in it with his. (Kragen Sitaker was there too and filled in my blanks when he caught up with the discussion.) It’s really quite a pity that noone knows about it anymore; may not be the most practical language in today’s environments, but there’s something achingly elegant about its relentless minimalism. It’s the most radically conservative (in the Wheeler sense) language I know, defined in terms of itself more than any other, even Lisp/Scheme.

Posted by Aristotle Pagaltzis on 2007-02-18

2007-02-15

BitWorking

Ward Cunningham Interview