A long time ago I remember thinking that the Forth programming language was pretty cool. I really haven't heard anything about it in years. Is Forth still in use? If so, what types of applications is it being used for?
13 Answers
It's still in use by people like Apple and Sun - take a look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Firmware.
Chuck Moore, the man who invented forth, uses a dialect called color forth. He has some interesting projects going on:
http://colorforth.com/haypress.htm Haypress Creek supercomputer. It has 9 S40 multi-computer chips, each with 40 c18 computers. Total of 360 computers running at 700 Mips or 250 Gips. Each chip has 3 A/Ds and 3 D/As. Total of 27 of each.
http://greenarraychips.com/ His hardware company
Factor, a concatenative language similar to Forth, is gaining wide attention these days. This blog post shares the experience of using Factor in education. Niue, an embeddable language for Java applications was inspired by Forth.
You can have a look at the [archived] Space-Related Applications of Forth webpage that some of NASA's members use it. Not sure how up to date that list is though…
I'd have started with this http://www.forth.com/
The latest update is 29 Dec 2009. That seems definitive. Someone is using it.
You could ask for a customer list. That would tell you who. You can ask them how and where.
FORTH is very useful on microcontrollers, as it uses very little memory, can be fast, and easier to code than in assembly, even interactively. There are more implementation for Arduino, for example the AmForth.
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