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Small Programs and Languages
My Implementing a Forth article got some great feedback, particularly around the subject of tiny Forth implementations. (And it was an excuse to list some of the tiniest Forths I’ve seen.) I know I’m not alone in seeing the appeal of tiny Forths, tiny languages, tiny programs, and just small stuff in general.
An honorable mention must be made here for SNOBOL, which is kind of like assembly language both for the rigid syntactic reasons listed above and also because it presents a similar control flow challenge. I don’t think it’s super easy to program effectively and safely with C, but there’s no denying it’s compact and pretty expressive for its size. Microworlds: The idea of small, self-contained, learnable programming environments also has a David Ungar connection I discovered while watching his talk.
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