Build Date: Sat Jul 5 22:20:39 2025 UTC
It's important for us to explain to our nation that life is important. It's not only life of babies, but it's life of children living in, you know, the dark dungeons of the Internet.
-- G.W. Bush, Arlington Heights, Ill., Oct. 24, 2000
LEARN FORTH
1999-10-03 14:07:49
dewdz! I finally found a good Forth tutorial on the WEB! Praise be to Jesus!
I'm trying desperately to learn Forth real hard, in order to break my brain the final last bits and become the ultimate Bad Person of the Future. I think I pointed this out before, but it bears repeating: Forth is the horrible drunken rogue elephant of the programming world. Future space dictators will use Forth to program their legions of oppress-o-bots because it will make them EXTRA RUTHLESS and UNPREDICTABLE.
Anyways, learning Forth is hard. Not just because it's CRAZY in a tuneless-piping-of-idiots Lovecraftian way, but also because there AREN'T any good learning references on the Web. Maybe trying to explain Forth drives already unstable programmers over the edge into the realm of madness, where invisible demons drag them through the street and gnaw on their bones. So, like, they can't finish that Forth tutorial page or whatever. I dunno. This is just a theory.
Well, anywho, just when I was about to despair and go back to some prosaic and sane language like Python, I found the pForth Web page on Google. The Web site is GREAT. pForth is an implementation of Forth that is GREAT. (It's public domain, even.) But the most GREAT thing is that there's a FORTH TUTORIAL available.
The tutorial is good and easy and I was able to go through it in a couple of hours. I don't think it teaches you everything you need to know about Forth, but I think it gives you a good enough starting point to be able to teach yourself the rest. At least, I think so.
If doing the tutorial makes Forth too easy and prosaic, try doing it in FRENCH instead. Pretend you're a mad reclusive Quebecois robotics expert with a rocket launcher and a dream. I dunno, maybe it could help.
Rock the house and LEARN FORTH.
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