> Sadly, Forth, much as I love it and have done since I got my hands on a Jupiter Ace when I was about 9 or 10 years old, has not been a success, and probably for the same reasons as Lisp.
I don't like when anything short of taking over the world counts as failure. Forth has been an enormous success! Forth has visited asteroids, run factories and booted millions of computers. It has done well, and if it's heading off into the sunset it should be remembered for what it did rather than what it didn't do. I would be beyond thrilled if my language did a tenth as well as Forth.
I didn't say it was a failure, I just said it wasn't a success.
It fits a particular ecological niche, but these days there's almost no reason to do things that way. In the olden days of the early 90s when I needed to write embedded code to run on what was basically a Z80 SBC, it was easier to write a Forth for it and assemble it natively on a clunky old CP/M machine (I used a Kaypro of some sort at work, but an Osborne 1 at home) than it was to struggle on with the crappy (like, really crappy) MS-DOS cross-assembler on the PCs we had.
Now of course I could emulate every single computer in the entire company on a ten quid embedded board, all at the same time.
I don't like when anything short of taking over the world counts as failure. Forth has been an enormous success! Forth has visited asteroids, run factories and booted millions of computers. It has done well, and if it's heading off into the sunset it should be remembered for what it did rather than what it didn't do. I would be beyond thrilled if my language did a tenth as well as Forth.