I guess you could say that syntactically it's like lisp, only backwards and without the parens. But the deeper truth is that concatenative programming and procedural programming (or functional, I suppose, depending on your preferred lisp flavor) are very different paradigms that lead to fundamental differences in how you structure your code.
I haven't used Forth in anger for over two decades now, but in some ways I do miss how the language felt even more hackable than a good lisp, while simultaneously being easy to reason about at a low level. That said, the RPN and stack manipulation definitely make it a bit of a brain teaser, especially at first. In that sense it reminds me of Prolog and APL and, for that matter, Lisp: they're languages where the greatest joy of learning them is the way they force you to think in very different ways, and how that can promote epiphanies about computation.
I would need to spend more time grokking this language to really understand, but it appears that the author has effectively achieved something that's semantically equivalent to Forth, but has a lot of syntactic commonality with Lisp. That's rather compelling to me from a "eliminates the first and most noticeable stumbling block for newcomers" perspective. That said, I'm having to repress a bit of a desire to react the same way parts of the Racket community did when Matthew Flatt announced his infix syntax project. Is a key part of Forth's concatenative nature lost when the syntax itself is no longer concatenative? I don't know, and I'll admit it's very doubtful that I'll spend enough time with Forsp to find out. But it's an interesting thought, all the same.
I haven't used Forth in anger for over two decades now, but in some ways I do miss how the language felt even more hackable than a good lisp, while simultaneously being easy to reason about at a low level. That said, the RPN and stack manipulation definitely make it a bit of a brain teaser, especially at first. In that sense it reminds me of Prolog and APL and, for that matter, Lisp: they're languages where the greatest joy of learning them is the way they force you to think in very different ways, and how that can promote epiphanies about computation.
I would need to spend more time grokking this language to really understand, but it appears that the author has effectively achieved something that's semantically equivalent to Forth, but has a lot of syntactic commonality with Lisp. That's rather compelling to me from a "eliminates the first and most noticeable stumbling block for newcomers" perspective. That said, I'm having to repress a bit of a desire to react the same way parts of the Racket community did when Matthew Flatt announced his infix syntax project. Is a key part of Forth's concatenative nature lost when the syntax itself is no longer concatenative? I don't know, and I'll admit it's very doubtful that I'll spend enough time with Forsp to find out. But it's an interesting thought, all the same.