I miss 'FORTH' the programming language

[stevelup]

At least one of them is STILL promarily customized by programming in COBOL.

COBOL is still very much here...

One of our primary business apps runs on this.

[rrinker]

 MicroFocus COBOL is indeed what is embedded in the HR app I was referring to.

Now that's an old name - or sort of at least, I certainly remember seeing ads for MicroFocus compilers back at least to the early 80's - prior to then I rarely read computer-focused magazines, I was a PE subscriber. Read the occasional Byte at the library after I picked out my books and was waiting for my Mom and sister to finish.

[rhb]

Focus was a major mainframe database package. MicroFocus appeared when the IBM PC was introduced.  I never used Focus directly, but lots of reports I generated while processing seismic data were produced by Focus applications.

[techman-001]

The rumors of the death of Forth have been greatly exaggerated ;-)

I have been maintaining a Forth documentation site for Mecrisip-Stellaris http://hightechdoc.net/mecrisp-stellaris/_build/html/index.html since around 2014 and it gets about 80 - 100 unique hits a day.

Mecisp-Stellaris caters for ARM Cortex-M while Mecrisp caters for MSP-430.

There is also a Mecrisp-Quintus for RISC-V and PIC32, a Mecrisp-ICE which is an enhanced version of Swapforth and the J1a stack processor by James Bowman.

Mecrisp-Across is a tethered Forth for the MSP430, which uses a Ti Tiva Connected Launchpad as the cross-compiler and a 4 wire JTAG umbilical. The target MSP430 MCU does not use any preloaded firmware, and will run with only 500 Bytes of Flash, appearing to have a full Forth on board with 64KB of Flash. http://hightechdoc.net/mecrisp-across/_build/html/index.html

I have also started doing a few YouTube videos to demonstrate that Forth is keeping up with the times and also because there just aren't a lot of Forth videos around. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kDi-Nlz3-QA. They are pretty basic videos and not up to the high standard of eevblog, so don't expect too much!

I mainly use the STM32F051 for all my projects and examples as it's cheap, fast, tiny and immensely capable.

The Mecrisp* Home Page is: http://mecrisp.sourceforge.net/

Cheers,
Terry