I learned Snobol in school. It came in handy when I later encountered awk and then Perl.

?? 2 or 4 horse open sleigh project ??

I love this! SNOBOL is weird but the article does a great job showing the power of a small but very uniform and consistent language.

R. G. Loeliger Threaded Interpretive Languages Their Design And Implementation[1] is an amazing book, since it was out of print, I printed it on a good 160gsm a4 paper, and I randomly open it every few weeks just to read through it. I strongly recommend it, even if you are not interested in Forth.

I have been programming in all kinds of languages, from assembly to clojure, but in 25 years I never programmed stack languages, I was kind of scared of them, it wasn't until I read the book and made my own Forth I understood what I was missing. Since then I made few interpreters, with jit, or with types, etc, it was super fun, but most of all it allowed me to see a completely new paradigm of programming, kind of the first time you understand eval/apply from 13th page of the LISP 1.5 Programmer's Manual. A language that writes itself and it is written in itself.

If you are making your own Forth, this Brad Rodriguez's article is also really good [2].

[1]: https://archive.org/details/R.G.LoeligerThreadedInterpretive...

[2]: https://www.bradrodriguez.com/papers/moving1.htm

Are there any non-toy implementations of Forth?

Upvote for Ratfactor who made the most useful HTMX reference around (even though it wasn't completed) https://ratfactor.com/htmx/

Snobol was a major part of my formative years in computer science. I don’t recall how I came across the language, but it spoke to me in all sorts of ways.

- Elegant and weird syntax and structure.

- Powerful pattern matching.

- It was the first GCed language I used.

- The Griswold, Poage and Polonsky book on Snobol4. A classic in the K&R mold, to my mind.

- Took 2 compiler courses from RBK Dewar who worked on the Spitbol implementation. Great teacher, fantastic courses, with lots of insight into the Spitbol project and his research on the SETL language.

- Wrote software for my MSc thesis in Snobol4. It used so much memory that I had to book the school’s IBM 370 at 4AM to run the software. I think I got something like 1-2 MB of memory.

Does anyone know what is that cool little computer on the picture?

(Tangential) On a recent roadtrip up to Portland from SF I stopped in a small historic mining town near Shasta called Dunsmuir. They had a Little Free Library so of course I had to check out what was in it. I was delighted to find an old book on Forth from the 80s, called Starting Forth. Inside of the book there were some business cards for FIG: Silicon Valley Forth Interest Group.

SNOBOL is a high level string processing language. Forth is an odd thing to implement in it. Forth is so low level you can implement it in an FPGA.

SNOBOL has patterns more powerful than regular expressions. The pattern matching can take exponential time, because it's a depth first search in a recursive space. Regular expressions, which have very limited backup, were adopted to put an upper bound on pattern match time.

If you like Snobol, I'd take a look at Icon, Griswold's research language after Snobol. It took a lot of the ideas but smoothed it out.

I remember writing the Icon string manipulation in java in college, and I've hated regular expressions for a long time because Icon had it right, albeit verbose.

Check Starting Forth, Thinking Forth plus Eforth+Subleq.

SNOBOL-related. Others?

Eliza in SNOBOL4 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41889284 - Oct 2024 (24 comments)

Spitbol 360: an implementation of SNOBOL4 for IBM 360 compatible computers - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38234319 - Nov 2023 (6 comments)

SNOBOL (“StriNg Oriented and SymBOlic Language”) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35800936 - May 2023 (56 comments)

The SNOBOL4 Programming Language [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23345560 - May 2020 (6 comments)

SNOBOL4 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22233111 - Feb 2020 (1 comment)

Parsing with Snobol - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20401576 - July 2019 (1 comment)

Dave Shields, the programmer maintaining SPITBOL - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10211724 - Sept 2015 (23 comments)

SnoPy – Snobol Pattern Matching Extension for Python - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10106008 - Aug 2015 (10 comments)

On being the maintainer and sole developer of SPITBOL (2012) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10103276 - Aug 2015 (95 comments)

snobol and spitbol are awesome. as is forth. +1.

pretty cool seeing someone deep dive into the super niche stuff tbh, got me thinking - you reckon picking up oddball languages like that changes the way you even approach writing code later on?