Comment by chalst

In some ways it is even more abstraction-friendly than C because of how easy it is to manipulate functions or redefine its own interpreter/compiler. There was a nice example of a Tiny C compiler written in Forth by Marcel Hendrix posted to comp.lang.forth, with a Forth-defined VM as target. I posted a story about it at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23455548

The big problem with Forth is software reliability: ad-hoc Forth code is hard to reason about in any generality. Languages like Factor show that dialects of Forth can be much better in this regard.