Forthification of Web Browser Programming

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May the Forth be with you

2018, the 50th anniversary of the Forth programming language

The web browser, like the Unix terminal, to some programmers, is an interesting entity. In fact, more than interesting. To explain the interesting properties of the web browser and the Unix terminal, we need to resort to something even older than Unix itself, and still surviving.

No, it is not LISP. But it is also related to LISP. More later about the relationships between Forth and LISP.

In fact, there are many interesting ideas in programming from the pre-ALGOL era, that have been obscured by more sophisticated (read “complicated”) ideas related to the so called “third generation programming languages”, which seem to have recently hit the phase of diminishing returns. Plenty of these can still be found in the still active comp.lang.forth newsgroup.

In this article, we attempt to describe some of our preliminary efforts to “reboot” some of the oldest programming concepts, for the benefits of the next generation programmers, as in our most humble opinion, there have just been too much “toxins” since the days of “object oriented programming”, which of course grew in line with the (Intel’s Gordon) Moore’s Law. However, the “other” Charles Havice “Chuck” Moore created an alternative “school” of programming in the Forth programming language, from which we derive much inspiration.