When looking at these kind of subcultures, I think the best policy is "learn from them, but remember that they don't learn from you". They may have a unique better take on some aspects, but they will try to convince you to scorn all other viewpoints, and that's always worse than the gain.
More generally, even if someone says something questionable, there may be something to learn from what they said. Always seek to learn and grow, because all that you can learn from is before you.
Ok, if my comment came across as saying to scorn forth, then it was badly written.
Chuck Moore is a genius. How many other people created a language, wrote their own semiconductor simulator and ECAD system, and used it to design their own CPU? But, Forth has a strong culture of NIH, and it started with him. Maybe you need a degree of arrogance and self-belief to do the things he's done. Sadly, most people are not such geniuses as to be able to get away with it.
What I tried, perhaps badly,to say; is that it's worth learning everything from Forth culture except for contempt for everything that's not Forth. There are a lot of things wrong with common-denominator programming languages, and common-denominator practices; and it can be exciting for a young programmer to join a community which openly expresses the problems and has an alternative view. (This was especially the case 15-20 years ago when C++ hegemony was at its height). But it can easily become parochial.
The lesson of Forth for me, is that you can really gain a lot of productivity by ruthlessly removing generalisations and focusing on the exact problem you want to solve; and not being afraid to re-implement stuff in order to do so - if you can do it in a simpler way. I don't think adopting concatenative syntax is necessary to do this; there are too many examples where it was achieved without.
Chuck Moore has argued that all programming should adopt this radical simplification approach; this seems to be the case put by the OP (although not explicitly). I don't think it works. Too many tasks require a degree of collaboration which is enabled by the abstractions. Rewriting everything simpler works for a lone programmer, but it means you have to understand everything, and sometimes you just have to interoperate with some system whose complexity can't be refactored away. Take Unicode- Chuck Moore's answer would be "throw away unicode" but most of us don't have that choice.
I have never seen that, most in the Forth world seem resigned to obscurity and content living in their own world. If you could point me to the people advocating Forth above all else, I would love to see it and I don't mean that in a "you're wrong, I'm right" way, I just want to see what their methods are.
