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That FORTH cannot muster the decency to include a simple «U» in its name rather scuppers any hope of an aesthetic parley before the tea’s even been poured.

Joking aside, FORTH’s reliance on the stack as virtually its only data structure – along with its insistence on applying it to everything and everyone – is simply too impractical outside a few niche areas, such as low-level hardware programming or document rendering (hello, PostScript!). I have no doubt a JSON parser in FORTH will emerge as part of Advent of Code 2038, but I can’t imagine it will inspire hesitating potential converts to embrace the language with open arms.




I’ve not used FORTH, but I learned UIUA last year which has the stack paradigm. You just have to be more careful about your function design and the order of application. I was using emacs and there were annotations by the language server that said how many items you’re taking from the stack and how many will stay behind.




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