Re: [gforth] whatever happened with Forth

[Anton Ertl]

On Fri, Sep 06, 2019 at 08:42:04AM -0400, J. David Boyd wrote:
> 
> Why has Forth disappeared so completely?   I guess I really mean, why did it
> lose popularity.  I came along just as Forth Dimensions was disappearing, and
> all the different Forth companies were all going out of business.
> 
> I love Forth, it seems like a perfect language. Not that easy to hook it up to
> all the Microsoft stack perhaps, but still wonderful once you do.
> 
> Is it just that the world has moved on?

That's not really Gforth-specific, and there are many speculations and
conspiracy theories around the topic.

Here are my guesses:

The main reason is that Forth provides a good advantage in small
systems, but once machines got larger (say, >64KB RAM), the size
advantage of Forth became unimportant.  Other advantages still exist,
but have to compete against perceived advantages of other programming
languages.

It also does not help that many in the Forth community revel in the
past glory of small programs on small systems, and reject features
that are useful for larger programs.

- anton