The Best Programming Language for the End of the World

Coding in Forth reminded me of the lawless dystopia in Mad Max. You make your own rules, subject to the limits of the context. You can redefine the IF statement if you so please. You can rewrite machine code instructions for a Word. You can even change Words during run time. Because Words become keywords themselves in Forth, you can create a language that’s optimized for a single purpose, packing commands that would otherwise be dozens of lines into just one. “In Forth, you’re creating your own language,” Leo Brodie, author of the first Forth textbook, Starting Forth, told me. Machine Readable A regular column about programming. Because if/when the machines take over, we should at least speak their language. The low-level nature of Forth, while key to its processing power, made programming feel foreign. It uses postfix, a form of mathematical notation that renders 2 + 1 as 2 1+ and which I found neither intuitive nor even really legible. And while most languages allow memory to be br ... Read full article.