While programmers love talking about the virtues of minimalism and simplicity, each of us depends on a mountain of abstraction and complexity: build systems, package managers, deployment infrastructure, etc. But much like the suburbanite dreaming of a tiny house in the woods, we find ourselves wishing we could give up all the tools and best practices and work "close to the metal." Could we live without garbage collection? Built-in data structures? Variable names?
These are the principles of Forth, a radically minimalist programming language. This talk explores my experiences in the Forth wilderness: how Forth embodies a computational "rugged individualism", and the peculiar freedom that comes from working with so little abstraction. We'll also discuss what drives people away from Forth, and how I have tried to integrate The Forth Way into my work when I returned to the creature comforts of high-level programming languages.
