Here's a post I wrote about why I used FORTH to code ChipWits in 84:

https://chipwits.com/2023/04/08/forth-programming-language-g...

Forth has been something I've wanted to learn for years now. It seems weird to me that for most stuff in old computers, you have the option of "assembly" if you want your program to be fast, and "BASIC" if you want your program to be slow, but Forth lingers along as the "medium speed" language, despite at least looking pretty high-level.

Looks very cool!

Relatedly, there's http://tumbleforth.hardcoded.net/, which I think looks lovely. Has anyone gone through that and would like to share their experience?

ValForth from Valpar was one of the first cross platform FORTH implementations in the Atari ST ecosystem, and it had some clever extensions for games.

https://www.atarimagazines.com/rom/issue1/jumping_forth.php

But like the post mentions, even the 8-bits had FORTH from Elcomp, and books like https://www.atarimania.com/documents/FORTH-on-the-Atari-Lear.... Leo Brodie's "Starting FORTH" is still a great intro.

While we all learned BASIC, these alt languages helped us learn that there actually are radically different metaphors to program the device

Mind expanding to a kid in the 80s!

Forth seems to be one of those write once languages like perl. Easy to start writing and building, but come back to the code in a year or so, no clue what it does.

But really fast and efficient.