I've been playing around with Forth (after mucking about in Haskell), and although I have done some embedded work, most of these languages are in the doldrums as far as the rest of the world is concerned. For example, most of the websites you find wrt to Forth are from the eighties, nineties or early oughts. Within their niches they are quite dynamic, but outside....
The biggest problems, though, are not the languages per se, but the lack of libraries. Since most of the heavy users are commercial, they keep them to themselves.
So imagine my surprise when I stumbled over a language the other day that I've never seen (or heard of) before Factor. A stack-based, concatenative language inspired by "Forth, Joy, Lisp, and Common Slate".
So far, so ho hum. Another Ivory Tower Language, that won't survive in the wild. One thing caught my eye, though: On Intel, it runs in Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD and Solaris.
Huh.. that got me interested. With that many environments, they must be committed to maintenance. But, what about that old bugbear: Libraries? No one wants to start from scratch, especially when learning a new language. I downloaded the dmg (yes, grashopper, they have an integrated environment for OS X -- did I not say these guys were committed?), and looked in the core, extras, etc folders. Holy Mother of [insert]!!! It had everything. Networking, graphics, database, http server, xml-rpc, concurrence a la Erlang (this is what got my attention) etc, etc, etc.
Is it perfect? No, but it is certainly a very, very interesting project, where you can create real programs. Their website actually runs on a http server created with Factor. Slava Pestov is a mathematician from the University of Ottawa, and he's managed to quietly collect a nice group of devs committed to the project, and really have created a nice language in just 4 years. Their skill level is extremely high, both on the high-level theory side of things, as well as the base level machinecode/assembly. Truly inspiring.
I have only been looking at this for four days, but it's fascinating. Sorry about the long post, but it has been many, many years since I've been truly excited about a language. If this is your kind of thing, check it out (the site is kind of sucky right now, but they're ramping up a redesign in the near future), you won't regret it.
Now, back to programming towers of hanoi for the 95567'th time.
The biggest problems, though, are not the languages per se, but the lack of libraries. Since most of the heavy users are commercial, they keep them to themselves.
So imagine my surprise when I stumbled over a language the other day that I've never seen (or heard of) before Factor. A stack-based, concatenative language inspired by "Forth, Joy, Lisp, and Common Slate".
So far, so ho hum. Another Ivory Tower Language, that won't survive in the wild. One thing caught my eye, though: On Intel, it runs in Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD and Solaris.
Huh.. that got me interested. With that many environments, they must be committed to maintenance. But, what about that old bugbear: Libraries? No one wants to start from scratch, especially when learning a new language. I downloaded the dmg (yes, grashopper, they have an integrated environment for OS X -- did I not say these guys were committed?), and looked in the core, extras, etc folders. Holy Mother of [insert]!!! It had everything. Networking, graphics, database, http server, xml-rpc, concurrence a la Erlang (this is what got my attention) etc, etc, etc.
Is it perfect? No, but it is certainly a very, very interesting project, where you can create real programs. Their website actually runs on a http server created with Factor. Slava Pestov is a mathematician from the University of Ottawa, and he's managed to quietly collect a nice group of devs committed to the project, and really have created a nice language in just 4 years. Their skill level is extremely high, both on the high-level theory side of things, as well as the base level machinecode/assembly. Truly inspiring.
I have only been looking at this for four days, but it's fascinating. Sorry about the long post, but it has been many, many years since I've been truly excited about a language. If this is your kind of thing, check it out (the site is kind of sucky right now, but they're ramping up a redesign in the near future), you won't regret it.
Now, back to programming towers of hanoi for the 95567'th time.