Forth is a set of vibes as much as it is a programming language. As the saying goes, "once you know one Forth, you know one Forth" . There's an example given in "Starting Forth" to demonstrate the unique virtures of Forth ¹: : WASHER WASH SPIN RINSE SPIN ;.

If you're a little familiar with Forth, but haven't read much of the literature on it from the 80s and 90s, this example might seem almost underwhelming. This example, and following code snippets that expand it out a bit, never use the stack, for example. This might be due to their position at the start of an introductory text on Forth, I can certainly appreciate the difficulties of choosing when to introduce concepts in a language tutorial. It also shows a surprising part of Forth: The stack is merely one tool in how Forth is built, it's a means, not really the end.

The end, at least as far as I can make out, is build the simplest system offering the prosodic solution of a problem. Forth's early practitioners embraced its role as a technology that necessarily shapes the solution of problems it was applied to. These days, we decry Forth for rejecting essential complexity, and then turn around and write software using solutions that force people to buy ever more capable hardware. The modern software development philosophy shapes the solution space of problems that it is applied to just as much as Forth did, but in ways that we are told are For The Greater Good. This Greater Good often goes uninterrogated, unless you are one of the many misforunate who are bloodied under the treads of the system.

But, I think this... desire for systems and problems molded to each other, concisely exposited, obviously correct, and built to be inhabited by people, is easily lost in the whelming novelty of reverse polish notation, stack shuffling and concessions to 8-bit hardware that characterize early Forths. There's a reason that Chuck tuts at code that forces more than two elements on the stack to be tracked by the developer. It gets in the way of the legibility of the code, of the obviousness of the correctness. Do you understand the problem well enough if you must torture both machine and mind by introducing complexity so? Why must you sum and multiply vectors, rather than scribing steps, spirtually communing with the silicon?

Alas, our problems, our daily lives, do not tidily fit into definitions that concern themselves with a mere two to four words of stack RAM. Our hardware now commonly speaks in 64 bits, to the point that programs take up twice the memory to do so. And, in this age of stacked memory protections, of gigabytes given to compilations, Brodie's Washing Machine seems to lose the plot entirely. Sure, you could do that in '81, but this is the greater '26, our washing machines do not merely WASH SPIN RINSE SPIN.

I might have found a bridge, framed with just enough complexity to be taken seriously, yet simple enough to elict nostalgia.

Consider, if you will, a Forth dialect to interact with the browser DOM.

[1]: well, unique in 1981, Forth has gone on to inspire quite a few imitators since then.