It feels like anything is mowed down on the internet. I’ve been a dev for a long time too, and I never feel sure when I chose a stack for a new toy project (in my day job I rarely get to chose, so that’s a non issue there)
There is a good quote from Bjarne Stroustrup for that “There are only two kinds of languages: the ones people complain about and the ones nobody uses”. I think for hobby projects it’s the best to use languages that interest you
This for sure. At work (fe dev), I need to get things done quickly and reliably, so I use Svelte. At home, I’m just playing around, so I’ll try things that are out of my wheelhouse or strange, eg rn I’m rebuilding the site I always rebuild in Qwik, Go, and Surrealdb - why? Because they seem neat. (Though I might just rm rf that to build something on Bun, because is there anything is can’t do?)
I feel like nobody ever bad mouths forth. Arguably it’s just because it’s super niche, but there’s lots of niche languages that people shit on all the time. I guess if you’re the kind of person to bother trying out a forth you’re probably going to think it’s neat.
Props for actually answering the question, and with a reasonable language too. Although Forth hasn’t clicked for me personally, and I doubt it’s a better choice for OP, it’s still a unique language design and worth studying.
Yeah. I think Forth is kind of just interesting for what it is and it fits it’s niche well. If you’re looking into Forth you probably appreciate it for what it is, and it’s a super flexible language so it can kind of be what you want it to be. It’s obviously not perfect, and it’s not the ideal fit for what most people want to do… but I guess people just don’t really expect it to be more than it is and it’s a smaller community so nobody is too vocal or angry about it. People will complain about other niche languages like lisp, ocaml, prolog, or Haskell all the time, but people don’t say much about Forth, and when somebody does talk about it it’s pretty much all praise. The Forth people are just content I guess!
If all you want in a programming language is that it not frequently be the target of mean-spirited critical reviews, I recommend Befunge. It’s a bit old and I don’t think anyone has updated it to be powerful enough for modern enterprise-level work, but there exists a non-zero chance that it might be suitable for one of your toy projects.
If you met or worked with the people who post the majority of the programming-language-ism posts, you would know deep down in your bones how little you need to be listening to them.
Who cares what people online are saying? Most people just like to hate on the popular thing to hate because it makes them feel like they are sitting at the cool kid’s table at lunch.
Obviously consider the limitations of what you’re using for the project you’re using it for. But do the analysis for yourself. Don’t avoid something just because people don’t like it.
For example Javascript gets a lot of flak online but it’s one of the most popular languages and in my opinion, it’s great for what it does. I prefer coding in JS over Python even if JS has those idiosyncrasies that makes it the subject of many memes online.
Ie
'2' + 2 = '22'
