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comment by user-inactivated
user-inactivated  ·  4086 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Follow up to "The Unreasonable Effectiveness of C"

Well, I feel like it would do the software industry some good if there was a low-level language that was still very high level (in that it has high-level abstractions) with C speed (or faster) and C portability. I dunno. I'm also fascinated by how nothing's managed to come along after all this time and pushed C off its throne.

Aren't building and using new abstractions what programming is all about? Why not have new abstractions in a low-level setting?





briandmyers  ·  4085 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Someday I'd like to delve into Forth for an embedded project, for exactly these reasons.

user-inactivated  ·  4085 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Why forth?

briandmyers  ·  4085 days ago  ·  link  ·  

I've only read a little about it but it seems very object oriented, and a bit like Lisp for hardware. A different approach but a big learning curve.

user-inactivated  ·  4085 days ago  ·  link  ·  

What I don't get is how to structure your programs in forth. In C, it's natural with control flow and functions, but in forth, everything's a function, so it can all be written in one line...

user-inactivated  ·  4085 days ago  ·  link  ·  

hmmm, didn't know it was an oop, thought it was just functional composition and nothing else.

briandmyers  ·  4085 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Yes, exactly. As I said I only know a little about it, but it seems like you use Forth to design a language which matches (and controls) your machine. As you sometimes use Lisp to build other languages.

user-inactivated  ·  4085 days ago  ·  link  ·  

but how would that make it oop? that would just mean that it sorta enables metaprogramming.

briandmyers  ·  4085 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Now that you mention it, I think I've gotten my wires cross about the object-orientation angle; I think i was thinking of Smalltalk. It's another language that I've also thought would be interesting to learn, sometime. I really don't know a lot about either of them, though.