Forth

I would not be surprised if an easter egg exists on xkcd.com provided you satisfy these requirements.

My first PID controller was in Industrial Craft & Tekkit modded Minecraft.

I present to you, the return-stack skill:

https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/tree/main/skills/return-...

See Self's "dynamic deoptimization", where it constructs a virtual return stack on demand that you would have had, were it not for the JIT compiler's agressive inlining.

Debugging Optimized Code with Dynamic Deoptimization, by Urs Hölzle, Craig Chambers, and David Ungar:

https://bibliography.selflanguage.org/_static/dynamic-deopti...

And a return-stack rotated 180 degrees around in time is an action-queue:

https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/tree/main/skills/action-...

From games like The Sims:

https://sims.fandom.com/wiki/Action_queue

Also the ever popular advertisement skill, more like comefrom than goto:

https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/tree/main/skills/adverti...

Also from The Sims:

https://simstek.fandom.com/wiki/SimAntics

The Sims, Pie Menus, Edith Editing, and SimAntics Visual Programming Demo:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-exdu4ETscs

Forward Japanese Notation

it's somewhat alive.

they do some releases, they have a somewhat big project of rewriting vm in zig.

I don't think anyone loves PostScript though...

The Forth (and Lisp) posts will continue until the entire HN population has been converted.

I am glad that this forum that has mostly been colonized by the ‘normies’ still manages to keep these two languages in the conversation, capturing curious passersby with their exotic allure. In every post you see new prey with the comments like ‘I keep reading about Lisp and I still don’t get why it’s popular. All I see is parentheses. Can anybody explain?’

I fear the day HN closes is the day those languages will die.

I think there are phases where it becomes more popular, if some discussion topically references FORTH, or Lisp, you know that within a few hours other people will read them and make submissions on the same theme.

It's nice.

As for me I'll almost blindly vote up anything that references FORTH because I love implementing it. I don't use it. Few people do these days, but writing toy implementations is satisfying, for sure.

(I do use Lisp, and within the past month posted my own lisp compiler here. A few votes and a brief bit of commentary which is about all it deserved. But I like seeing other people's approaches and I suspect that's why it got the minimal attention it did.)

It's archaic, powerful, expressive, compact. I'd describe it as an interactive macro-assembler on steroids. What's not to like?

But it's different. Certainly not for everyone (imho that makes it even more interesting). So yeah, shouldn't hurt the HN audience to pop by now & then.

It does seem like it the last few days

Complaining about COBOL in 2026 feels like a joke, especially when doing AI coding and writing book sized instructions to be read by bots.

You can't have _any_ BR all in one line.

A different way to say the same: in forth, words get pushed on the stack, and popped from the stack by words that take arguments:

    code           stack
    I Forth love

    Forth love     I

    love           I
                   Forth

    ; love presumably pops
    ; subject, object args
    ; from stack - and does something 
    ; perhaps prints as side effect

  ( FMOVE -- functional intersegment move                   ) HEX

  88 CONSTANT *MOV*  ( fn = 0 )   20 CONSTANT *AND*  ( fn = 1 )
  08 CONSTANT  *OR*  ( fn = 2 )   30 CONSTANT *XOR*  ( fn = 3 )

  CODE FMOVE ( fn s.seg s.off d.seg d.off length --)  AX, SI MOV
      CX POP  DI POP  ES POP  SI POP  DS POP  DX POP  AX PUSH
                        AL, # *XOR* MOV  DX, # 3 CMP  1$ JE
                        AL, #  *OR* MOV  DX, # 2 CMP  1$ JE
                        AL, # *AND* MOV  DX, # 1 CMP  1$ JE
                        AL, # *MOV* MOV               1$:
     CS: HERE 5 + , AL MOV  ( modify "[DI], AL MOV" ) 2$:
                      LODS  ES: [DI], AL MOV  DI INC  2$ LOOP
      AX, CS MOV  ES, AX MOV  DS, AX MOV  SI POP  NEXT,  END-CODE

                                                            -->

    Forth
    I

Forth I assume uses reverse polish notation: arguments before the operator.

3 4 +

for example, would return 7.

Forth uses RPN so the "verb" is last.

That is, you provide the data first (I and Forth) and the command (heart) last.

I found https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/Main_Page quite useful for that.

Master Yoda's speech, secret solved is; an old Forth programmer is he simply.

I doubt yoda speak is actually strict enough, but I do enjoy the idea that Yoda comes from a reverse Polish civilization.

My brain tells me Yoda speak would likely be: love Forth, I do.

But then he would also say: Forth is the path to the Light Side…