"... Lisp is what you get if you expend the least amount of effort on syntax, semantics, and codegen ..." That sounds about right. The result is still beautiful.

@headinthebox lisp, scheme, smalltalk, (color)forth + greenarrays, k(db) … the anti-thesis to layers of layers of (not so great) abstractions, libraries, slop, … simplicity is evergreen though even in a world where code generation cost is going to zero arguably even more useful now

@__tosh @headinthebox Forth is such a wonderful language to implement, but it's not the most fun to use. But still: I think "Thinking Forth" is still worth a read for developers. It taught me to appreciate how much is achievable with so little language.

@angular2react @headinthebox thinking forth is great, agree I also find it clarifying if something is complex in forth it tends to be inherently complex there is no place to hide that said: I have little experience in it yet needs some re-wiring in my head much to learn :)

@__tosh @headinthebox I dabbled around with it as bored conscript and started writing a forth like language interpreter. That was fun! During Uni I did a class called "Stackbased languages" and my team mate signed us up for a coding competition.

My Forth story, you may have heard me tell it before. One of my fellow students was a real old-school stoner, who, perhaps because of that, was a big Forth fan. One day, while high as a kite, he showed me he could redefine Forth words so that 2 3 + . returned 7. Sooooo cool he thought. At that time I was still confused that in Basic let x = x+1 worked, so this was literally out of this world madness for me. I did up buying Starting Forth (forth.com/wp-content/upl…, amazing artwork!) and play with threaded interpreters for SKI combinator reduction (sinclairql.speccy.org/archivo/docs/b…) in PDP-11 assembly. Good times!

@headinthebox @__tosh Oh wow, I totally forgot about that book. I used the web-version in 2007 when I was learning Forth. It's a great introduction to the language. My professor Anton Ertl, who held "stackbased languages", did research on threaded code execution and Forth. Cool stuff!