Comment by undershirt
5 years ago
> Forth doesn't elegantly describe complex algorithms… However, this mental pain does makes you question your need for complexity… This is something that I think few developers are familiar with and is hard to describe with words. It needs to be experienced.
Nice framing, that it’s not an intellectual argument you can make to justify the benefits of drawbacks (i.e. an infamous red flag of stockholm syndrome), so you have to point to the experience of the thing itself (“you had to be there”).
Or there are experiences which have hard to describe intangible qualities that are hard to put logically. Not sure why you have to reach for stockholm syndrome here.
my comment was way off the mark, didn’t realized it sounded sarcastic. i was instead trying to appreciate his approach to the intangible—pointing to direct experience to avoid stockholm criticism.
I'll agree with the article's author - there is a quality to a Forth-style solution that just doesn't compare to other languages' styles or overall structure.
When I first heard of Forth and started trying out some of my own code, I was surprised by the initial effort it took me to adjust to writing small words vs C style functions.
I then started building on the pieces I first wrote, and it took very little code to cover my needs.
So yes, there's a very different experience, and it does take adjustment for anyone only familiar with function-style code. And it is not just what I've described, there's a whole different thought pattern involved.