Re: on Perl

On 16/04/2024 12:58, Christian Weisgerber wrote:

On 2024-04-16, David Brown <david.brown@hesbynett.no> wrote:
 

Forth is alive and well, albeit not very common.  It is used in embedded
systems - it is almost certainly the smallest language and run-time
system where you can have a extendable high-level language, and runs
directly on even very small microcontrollers.

 It has also been used since circa 1999 as the embedded language of
the FreeBSD boot loader, another constrained environment.  In the
end Forth proved too unpopular, few people touched it, and it is
being replaced with Lua now.
 

People who have used Forth a lot tend to be very enthusiastic about it, but it has a long learning curve to get up to speed.  This is a big disadvantage compared to "competitors" like Lua.  It is perhaps fair to say that Forth is alive and well as long as its current users are alive and well - as they retire, there are relatively few newcomers to the Forth community.