In the fourth code Remind me of the inability to dystopia Mad Max. You can make your own rules, but follow contextual restrictions. You can redefine the IF statement, please. You can rewrite a word machine code instruction. You can even change words at runtime. Since words become keywords in the fourth, you can create a language for single purpose optimization, otherwise wrapping the commands into dozens of lines. “In the fourth, you are creating your own language,” Leo Brodie, author of the first textbook, Start from scratch,tell me.
Ford’s low-level nature, while also being the key to its processing power, makes programming exceptional. It uses Postfix, a form of mathematical notation that presents 2+1 as 21+, which I find neither intuitive nor even clear. Although most languages allow for decomposition and moving memory, stack-based is stack-based – meaning data is stored in chronological order and managed on a last/advanced basis. I keep running into errors that force myself to give up what I think is common programming practices. I find myself trying to speak the language of a machine.
When I emailed Dupras for help, he compared Forth to driving a stick. It is more granular than the granularity of C. In the case where the latter defines call conventions, variable storage and return stack management, all of this attributes it all to the programmer. It interacts directly with memory in C’s way, but far exceeds C in terms of precision and efficiency. “People mistakenly think of it as a language,” Duplas said. “It’s a way to interact with computers.”
Most of us drive automatic reasons why the reason is not popular is the same reason. The personal computing boom of the 1990s sparked an obsession with technology, making it fit in your palm and making code easier to write. Language is abstracted to protect programmers from their own influences, and in the process, we get lost. For convenience, things got swollen, and in the words of Duplas, they began to “swip that pus oozed out in every corner.”
“The way we understand efficiency is so inclined,” Duplas said. Forth is the sickle of a Python lawnmower. “If you count the number of joules of grass per leaf, you’ll find that the person’s sickle is more efficient,” he said. “When you think of speed, you’ll think the lawn mower is more efficient.” From the time you collapse, you’ll think about your resources carefully. Apparently Duplas cut his lawn with a sickle. “At some point, you can be as fast as a lawnmower,” he said.
I began to find my own path. Instead of sending bytes to the ether like in Python and trusting the system to find out where they are, I am used to being responsible for allocating and freeing memory. All I can think of is what to store, where to store, and how much space I need. Each line of code suddenly loses weight. I’m Immortan Joe, my laptop is my castle, and my memory is my water.
Soon, I found myself refining and revisiting my code like my sentences. Instead of expecting the machine to expect my needs, I try to think like a machine to reach more than half. And, since I had to think twice, all the unnecessary complex abbreviations remind us to be concise in other coding languages - Yagni (you don’t need it), kissing (keep it simple, stupid), drying (don’t repeat yourself) – becomes obsolete.
