Forth is a very elegant programming language. it is almost entirely syntaxless, instead relying on a data stack to implicitly pass data through. where most popular languages will take a string like "func(f + 2) * (9 + 1)" and convert it to a sequence of linear operations, Forth code is entirely specified in linear operations. the equivalent to the above would be "f @ 2 + func 9 1 + *".
I am not a stack manipulation guru, and frequently make small mistakes in my code which lead to catastrophic failures, though I am very new to stack programming (written 2025-03-17). still, the flexibility imparted by stack programming is really enticing and cannot be overstated.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Lisp is a very elegant family of programming languages. its name is an abbreviation of "List Processing", and that shows through in a lot of its design. of particular note, the datastructures used for code are compatible with those used for data, and this allows for a number of clever runtime manipulations.
my Lisp experience is lacking (written 2025-03-17), so I cannot speak to my personal thoughts on it. my earlist experience was Emacs Lisp, which I found unpleasant, primarily due to GNU documentation. something about it does not click with me in the slightest.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Tcl is a very elegant programming language. every datatype has a 1:1 string representation, which allows the language to balance the convenience of stringly-typed data with actual complex data. it reads like a curly-braced Bash, but its syntax is actually on the level of flexibility and simplicity of a Lisp. similar to a Lisp, Tcl syntax is a superset of the syntax used to represent lists, and the programmer is encouraged to handle code strings like data.
it does have a number of rough edges, particularly in arithmetic, but generally I find it to be one of the least intrusive languages I work with. Tcl wants you to get shit done.
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