Comment by bitwize

Jonathan Blow is famously working on a programming language for games, called Jai; but he never mentions it by name when he streams. I think his concern is similar to Chuck Moore's: that the language should exist in the abstract, and when you start nailing it down too tightly by naming and standardizing it, you create problems later when you want to change those things. It's clay he can mold, something to experiment with. How much more true is that of Forth for Chuck.

The strange thing is that imho, as in many other things around language design, Scheme sort of had the right idea. I like having a well-defined semantics with wide agreement that I can write programs on. The fact that the Common Lisp standard is practically unchanged since the 80s, and the core of Ada has survived with only significantly useful extensions added on in later standards, is real neat to me, compared with C++0x/1x/2x being a completely different beast than the C++ of the 90s, and Rust and JavaScript undergoing constant churn. The RnRS process, historically, was all about defining a core that implementers could all agree on, calling it Scheme, and then letting implementers fuck around on top of that basis. R6RS and R7RS were controversial precisely because they deviated from this; although R7RS tried to please both the "small core" camp and the "Python with parens" camp. Which is kind of like trying to please both classic Sonic fans and post-Adventure Sonic fans.

But yeah, I think Chuck's advanced age and a general feeling of "I'm too tired for this shit" were the primary reasons for making that announcement. And you may be right, he may be just telling us not to get too attached to a particular artifact but to embrace the idea of Forth. Maybe the real ColorForth was the friends we made along the way. May the Forth be with you, my friend.