My history with Forth and stack machines (2010)

I've always been fascinated with Chuck Moore's VLSI design tools. How does he manage to design working VLSI chips with such limited functionality? Does he do complex simulation by hand? Wouldn't it get hard laying out each individual transistor?

I'll agree with a lot of his critiques, but one of his small ones that surprisingly echoed a lot of frustration was the dictum to prefer small definitions. > Quoting Chuck Moore: > Forth is highly factored code. I don't know anything else to say except that Forth is definitions. If you have a lot of small definitions you are writing Forth. In order to write a lot of small definitions you have to have a stack. It seemed like…

It's a bit unfortunate that this article is one of the most circulated accounts of a "failure" of applying Forth to a real-world problem. The author learned a little about Forth and was fascinated. He then wrote his own implementation and struggled mightily with it. Ultimately he was disenchanted. I think the heart of the problem is that the rudimentary ideas of forth- a stack, some stack-shuffling words, some arithmetic, control flow, and that's about it- are appealingly simple, but…

Btw there is an interesting resource about the concatenative languages http://concatenative.org/ I personally wonder why there is no modern popular language from this family.