The Best Programming Language for the End of the World

Coding successful Forth reminded maine of the lawless dystopia successful Mad Max. You marque your ain rules, taxable to the limits of the context. You tin redefine the IF connection if you truthful please. You tin rewrite instrumentality codification instructions for a Word. You tin adjacent alteration Words during tally time. Because Words go keywords themselves successful Forth, you tin make a connection that’s optimized for a azygous purpose, packing commands that would different beryllium dozens of lines into conscionable one. “In Forth, you’re creating your ain language,” Leo Brodie, writer of the archetypal Forth textbook, Starting Forth, told me.

The low-level quality of Forth, portion cardinal to its processing power, made programming consciousness foreign. It uses postfix, a signifier of mathematical notation that renders 2 + 1 arsenic 2 1+ and which I recovered neither intuitive nor adjacent truly legible. And portion astir languages let representation to beryllium breached up and moved around, Forth is stack-based—meaning information is stored chronologically and managed connected a last-in/first-out basis. I kept moving into bugs, forcing myself to wantonness programming conventions I had considered universal. I recovered myself struggling to talk the connection of the machine.

When I emailed Dupras to inquire for help, helium compared utilizing Forth to driving a stick. It’s much granular than C. Where the second defines calling conventions, adaptable storage, and instrumentality stack management, Forth leaves it each up to the programmer. It straight interacts with representation the aforesaid mode C does but acold outperforms C successful precision and efficiency. “People mistake Forth arsenic conscionable a language,” Dupras says. “It’s a mode to interact with the computer.”

The crushed Forth isn’t much fashionable is the aforesaid crushed astir of america thrust automatics. The idiosyncratic computing roar of the 1990s sparked an obsession with making tech acceptable your thenar and making codification easier to write. Languages were abstracted to support programmers from themselves, and determination on the way, we got lost. Things became bloated for the involvement of convenience and, successful Dupras’ words, started “oozing inscrutable pus astatine each corner.”

“The mode we recognize ratio is truthful skewed,” Dupras says. Forth is simply a scythe to Python’s lawnmower. “If you cipher the fig of joules per leaf of grass, you’ll find that the idiosyncratic scything is much efficient,” helium says. “When you deliberation of speed, you’d spot the lawnmower arsenic much efficient.” Forth forces you to beryllium precise and memory-efficient—to marshal your resources carefully, arsenic you would aft the collapse. Dupras cuts his ain tract with a scythe, obviously. “At a definite point, you tin spell arsenic accelerated arsenic a lawnmower,” helium says.

I began to find my way. Rather than sending bytes into the ether and trusting the strategy to fig retired wherever they go, arsenic I would successful Python, I got utilized to being liable for allocating and freeing memory. All I could deliberation astir was what was being stored, wherever it was being stored, and however overmuch abstraction it required. Each enactment of codification abruptly bore weight. I was Immortan Joe, my laptop was my Citadel, and representation was my water.

Soon I recovered myself refining and revisiting my codification similar I would a run-on sentence. Instead of expecting the instrumentality to expect my needs, I tried to deliberation similar the machine, to conscionable it much than halfway. And due to the fact that I had to deliberation twice, each the needlessly analyzable acronyms that punctual america to beryllium concise successful different coding languages—YAGNI (you aren’t gonna request it), KISS (keep it simple, stupid), DRY (don’t repetition yourself)—were rendered obsolete.