Friday, October 26, 2007

Dabbling With Forth

Want to give this whole Forth programming language a try? Check out myForth, a Java Applet that gives you instant access to a running instance of Forth.

Open up the Beginners Guide To Forth for help to get you started.

After a few false starts, I finally got down Hello World:

 : yo CR ." Hello World" CR ;
 yo

As a side note - what a blast from the past. This is a Geocities site running a Java Applet. What is this, 1998? It's amazing it runs as well as it does. If all Java Applets were this clean, maybe we wouldn't have had to abandon Java in the web browser?

Happy Forth'ing!

3 comments:

  1. This is not a comment on Forth, but a comment on Java Applets. But first a comment on Forth, yes it does sound real cool, one day when I have more time, I'll add it to the education list, first up PHP and Python (Python first). Anyways as for Applets, I think many have forgotten the abilities of an Applet. Many of the satellite and RADAR products on NWS sites use Java and most would never know. My group has a very detailed app written in Java and it comes in two flavors, a stand-alone and an Applet. If it wasn't for the fact that we occasionally need to access the local files system, we'd almost never use the stand-alone version. To put it plainly, I really like Applets when done right.

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  2. Nick -

    You're so right. Applets are among the most under appreciated technology out there. Actually, they're disliked even more than their the cell phone counterparts - Midlets.

    Luckily, they at least scored on Servlets.

    The moral of the story: invent enough variety of the same thing (worker class extending a base class, running in a container) and you're bound to get it right once in a while.

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  3. Servlets a big Yes, now JSP... that part of J2EE, I'm still on the fence, not sure if I like them or how useful they are when compared with other options like PHP and JavaScript/AJAX and stuff.

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