A Forth-inspired language for writing websites
94 points by speckx 9 hours ago | 13 comments
  • hvs 8 hours ago |
  • jng 8 hours ago |
    LLM-based coding is enabling so much! The crazy weekend project now can have compilation to native code and web assembly, allow server-side or client-side rendering, manage multiple types of persistence, include adaptive compression, and do all of this without breaking a sweat.

    It's scary but I love it.

    • coliveira 8 hours ago |
      For all its worth this could just be an AI generated blog post. There is no code, no repository, no link to any use.
    • killerstorm 7 hours ago |
      And yet people keep using React, relying on a fractal pattern of kludges.
      • PaulHoule 7 hours ago |
        This post isn't offering anything better.
      • nine_k 4 hours ago |
        React (and the unidirectional FRP approach in general) is the only known sane way to describe complex GUIs. It's the same approach that powers spreadsheet calculations.

        Most websites are not complex GUIs though, and do not need React.

        • wizzwizz4 3 hours ago |
          It's not "the only known sane way". In many cases, it's not even an appropriate approach! MVC, PAC, and self-contained widgets which make asynchronous calls to an API surface, are perfectly cromulent alternatives, each with their own strengths, but I've yet to see a situation where React was actually the best way to go.
        • killerstorm 3 hours ago |
          React is very different from dataflow computation - it rebuilds a component subtree upon a property update; it also doesn't quite understand what "property update" means because it's defined on top of JS semantics. It's a hodgepodge of leaky abstractions and outright insanity.

          I've been making GUIs (among other things) for 25 years, including 12 years using React, so you don't need to tell me how amazing it is. There's nothing particularly wrong with using React for rendering (although there's a whole lot of gotchas), the real problem is when people use React hooks for business logic - that's like you decide you need to fetch something in a middle of rendering screen.

    • moregrist 2 hours ago |
      I didn’t see anything about LLMs here.

      If you’ve never written or worked in a Forth-like language, it’s not a hard system to bootstrap up. If you’ve done it before and know assembly, you can even get something that compiles to (stack-heavy and pretty unoptimized) native code in essentially a weekend. No LLM needed.

      Forth-likes are almost magical in ways that are hard to describe. You start with primitives and literally build the language out of them. The interpreter and compiler are two different modes of the same REPL loop.

      It’s just a very different paradigm than most programmers know.

  • WorldMaker 8 hours ago |
    > I like how weird it is. I might use it for my site, who knows?

    If there's a place to use a weird and fun language it is certainly one's own personal blog. Sounds like a great opportunity, I think you should do it.

  • Someone 4 hours ago |
    > Something like this:

    > : h1 ( s -- ) "<h1>" emit . "</h1>" emit ;

    > "Hello, World!" h1

    So, what’s the difference between . and emit? It seems both take a string and output it to the HTML of the page. If so I don’t see why that couldn’t be

      : h1  ( s -- )  "<h1>" . .  "</h1>" . ;
    We also have:

      "2026-05-21T14:00:00Z"  "May 21, 2026"  dt-published
    where, I think, the idea is to always have the two strings consistent with each other. If so, why require the blog writer to do that conversion?
    • nine_k 4 hours ago |
      There's no docs or implementation, but I'd say that `.` in Forth is a generic way to print something, and `emit` may do more work, like HTML escaping.
      • wizzwizz4 4 hours ago |
        It looks like it's the opposite: `.` does HTML escaping, whereas `emit` is raw.