I’m new to the community and a relatively new programmer, as well. I’m very comfortable with C and the command line. But, do I need to start studying Forth to really contribute?
Collapse OS – Why Forth? – but I think most of the concatenative languages would be just as flexible, like Factor or Uxn
I would think C would work as long as you restrict it to a minimal base set:
c89 -Wall -Werror -Wpedantic– or be brave and use-nostdlib– but keep in mind, C was a mainframe language, it only later got adopted for microcomputers and then microcontrollersbut aside from those, you are looking for a language that:
- doesn’t require a lot of resources (power, memory, or storage)
- can be bootstrapped relatively easily: sectorForth, milliForth, sectorLisp, uLisp, Uxn
- has enough existing code (and community) to learn from (and isn’t some grad project that was abandoned after post-graduation)
- but also doesn’t have so much code that it’s now synonymous with lake-burning scrapers fouling the waters
- can run in constrained environments: commodity microcontrollers, 8-bit processors
- can be compiled in those same constrained environments (being able to bootstrap it rather than needing a server farm to cross compile it)
I’m new to the permacomputing concept, and just now hearing of Collapse OS. So thank you!
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I like Forth, but let us be honest, building stuff that last, that is efficient, that will not bitrot, that is built like a tank — you can do it with most of langauges!
Some projects (most popular one is CollapseOS) had reasons to pick Forth, but there are people with similar ethos who picked up C (check this game).
Welcome!
Forget forth. You need to learn iptscrae! Script the stack!




