I thoroughly enjoyed programming in Smalltalk, though I don’t feel like I’d have a compelling reason to work in it again.
I never had the opportunity to work in Forth, but I did learn its fundamentals a while back, playing with it a bit. It fascinated me, but for the life of me I can’t imagine why one would choose to use it–seems like it’s fairly harder to figure out how to solve a problem in it at times. Could be just because it’s a new paradigm for me.
I started reading Thinking Forth (and need to finish), hoping that will illuminate me with some thoughts on its value.
The back cover claims: Thinking Forth is meant for anyone interested in writing software to solve problems. The concepts go beyond Forth, but the simple beauty of Forth throws those concepts into stark relief.
I’m in the final stages of creating a learning track for 8th, a multi-platform Forth dialect. It has been a challenge and a half and I’m the better for it. Apologies if I’ve posted this before but do check out the Forth Values which have helped me reconsider some of my practices as a programmer.
I wonder if we could make a separate topic for forth/8th?
I’m very much interested in this because I had the pleasure of working with the creator of 8th many years ago on a volunteer project. This was long before I would consider becoming a programmer, it was a Hebrew translation project that I was contributing to, but in order to do it I had to learn how to use TeX and fossil, and he even got me to use Vim!
I opt for C. Whatever language x I learn or tinkle with,- I always return back to roots. Maybe because it’s good to know that in forever-changing world when compilers and new languages are spawning like a mushrooms after rain,- there’s always a “stable” shelter where you can return to. Or maybe my old and degrading brains are happy that they will not be punished any more with parsing new (and usually strange at first glance) programming concepts. Or maybe because GCC has hundreds of switches from which every user could find suitable ones at particular time moment.
C is turning 50 years right now. I’ve heard news that Linux kernel developers will be shifting from a C development to Rust,- in the long perspective. But I doubt that C will loose firm grounds any time soon. There’s too much hype about new languages (including Rust). I don’t say that Rust is bad. I’m sure it’s cool due to memory-safety guards included. But if you will use correct GCC switches,
for example, -fsanitize=undefined and others- it will be half-way to the correct C code. Maybe somebody will add in the future option -fsanitize=compile-time, to even stop compilation if semantic checks of memory safety fails,- then Rust will have no added value to the language “party” hehe :-)
Anyway, when Rust, Go or any other highly hyped new bombastic language will make it’s way into microcontrollers,- i.e. when even 80% of microcontroller manufacturers will start to produce Rust compilers for X board in the place of C compilers,- only then I will say that C has been conquered. But I doubt about that because manufacturers can’t even agree to build all boards with 100% support of C standard library (and it’s understandable, because sometimes they can’t, due to hardware limitations), so speaking about something more complex is empty ripples in the water.
Gotta love that Perl 5. I spent quite a bit of time learning and using it while I Pakistan back in the late 1990s. Arguably I might have been better of in the long run with something else, but the there was a lot of interest in it further up in the organisation, so I ran with it.
I always wonder, why Smalltalk is forgotten in list of languages (even it brought such things like, IDE, xUnit, TDD, UI windows,…) It reminds me, there was anniversary recently . See: 48 years of Smalltalk history
Algol 68 is very interesting - had some influence on C, etc.
2 Years ago, I wrote a bit about it, and also how to use it (easily) on Windows. Includes a specific editor for it - here: Algol 68
I never used Algol 68, but I learned ALGOL W in 1975 and used it for a few years (on an IBM 370/165 mainframe, in those different times).
Algol was a precursor to Pascal, and Turbo Pascal was pretty big for several years on early PCs. I had fun with it at the time, but I’m probably not alone in thinking that Embarcadero have now made Delphi quite annoying.
I’d not heard of Lazarus, but just looked at the website. Apparently, it’s open-source (GPL/LGPL) and cross-platform, which is attractive. I’ll try it.
And no, I’m not volunteering to build an Exercism track…
About some exotic languages. Some time ago I had created several programs for my project using Power Query M language. I was impressed that I could create relatively complex queries. Then I have solved several Exercism problems in this language!
Snobol - string manipulation language. From the 1960’s. If you pick the right problem, you can write Snobol so that it looks a bit like a BNF definition of the text you are working on. The following is not exact Snobol, but…
‘(’ any1 ‘+’ any2 ‘)’
would match text such as-
(33+total)
and would set any1 to ‘33’, any2 to’ total’
I wrote a summary of it, plus how to download for Windows, and with a pre-configured editor: Snobol - Mike Parr
It reminds me, there was anniversary recently 
. See: