1 Jan
2023
1 Jan
'23
11:21 p.m.
On Dec 31, 2022, at 6:40 PM, Larry McVoy
<lm(a)mcvoy.com> wrote:
All true except for the Forth choice. It's as bad, maybe worse, as
choosing Tcl for your language. I've written a ton of Tcl but I
need the Tk GUI part so I put up with Tcl to get it. I'd never
push Tcl as a language that other people had to use. Same thing
with Forth.
I dunno what I'd pick, Perl in the old days, Python now (not that
I care for Python but everyone can program it). Just pick something
that is trivial for someone to pick up.
(Moved to COFF)
I rather like FORTH. Its chief virtues are that it is both tiny and extensible. It was
developed as a telescope control language, as I recall, and in highly constrained
environments gives you a great deal of expressivity for a teeny tiny bit of interpreter
code. I adored my HP 28S and still do: that was Peak Calculator, and its UI is basically
a FORTH interpreter (which also, of course, functions just fine as an RPN calculator if
you don't want to bother with flow control constructs).
But I also make the slightly more controversial claim that FORTH is just LISP stood up on
end.
These days I think the right choice for those sorts of applications would be Micropython.
Yes, a full-on Python interpreter is heavyweight, but Micropython gives you a lot of
functionality in (comparatively) little space. It runs fine on a $4 Pi Pico, for
instance, which has IIRC 256KB RAM.
And if you find yourself missing TCL, there's always Powershell, which is like what
would happen if bash and TCL had a really ugly baby that just wouldn't shut up. The
amazing thing is that access to all the system DLLs makes it *almost* worth putting up
with Powershell.
Adam