What Forth is best at is boostrapping from bare metal to a reasonably high level language with the simplest design possible. Forth was first written at a time when there was a staggering amount of hardware in existence, so reimplementing the base language as quickly as possible was a huge plus. It's got a low floor but a high ceiling. It is a free-wheeling language that allows both very clever and very stupid things.
Unfortunately, this legacy means lots of fragmentation. There is not one cohesive community or set of standard libraries. Forth is very much a "do it yourself" language.
Forth can be very concise because all parameters are passed implicitly on the data stack by default. Parameters and arguments lead to a lot of duplication of expression in traditional languages because you need to give them explicit names both inside and outside the function.
If you prefer, it helps to treat it as a functional language where all functions take a stack and return a stack. All programs are a space separated list of function names. Of course, nothing stops you from using all the global variables you want.
What Forth is best at is boostrapping from bare metal to a reasonably high level language with the simplest design possible. Forth was first written at a time when there was a staggering amount of hardware in existence, so reimplementing the base language as quickly as possible was a huge plus. It's got a low floor but a high ceiling. It is a free-wheeling language that allows both very clever and very stupid things.
Unfortunately, this legacy means lots of fragmentation. There is not one cohesive community or set of standard libraries. Forth is very much a "do it yourself" language.
Forth can be very concise because all parameters are passed implicitly on the data stack by default. Parameters and arguments lead to a lot of duplication of expression in traditional languages because you need to give them explicit names both inside and outside the function.
If you prefer, it helps to treat it as a functional language where all functions take a stack and return a stack. All programs are a space separated list of function names. Of course, nothing stops you from using all the global variables you want.