ColorForth (2009)
One of the most impressive digital artifacts humans have yet produced, IMO.<p>Legend has it that Chuck Moore used to carry around his own 3D CAD system in a deck of punch cards in his shirt pocket.<p>&gt; Current software is shameful.<p>It&#x27;s not pleasant but I have to agree.  I&#x27;m ashamed of my industry.<p>Just yesterday I watched helplessly as an office manager and her boss struggled with their computer for ten minutes to complete a task that would have taken moments with paper.  The divining of intent (the UI&#x27;s embodied intent, not their own), the careful collecting and passing on of <i>cargo-cult</i> lore, groping blindly for the correct ritual to evoke the desired state on their machine...<p>It&#x27;s <i>our</i> fault.  I am ashamed.<p>ColorForth and things like Arcfide&#x27;s self-hosting GPU APL compiler are &quot;existence proofs&quot; that we can get the same jobs done with one or two orders of magnitude less code.<p>Doing that would free up dev&#x27;s mental and time resources to make better software,  i.e. spending time on the difficult and important chore of actually modelling the users&#x27; processes and providing automation that measurably improves their lives, rather than learning the next flash thing or reinventing the wheel for the Nth time.<p>In other words, your software editing environment including your language should allow for convergence and contraction of code.  Refactoring (aka DRY by those who must repeat themselves) is key, and Forth is notorious for refactoring.<p>In Cybernetics there&#x27;s a formal measure or concept called &quot;variation&quot;.  The variation of code should be at most a small constant greater than the variation in human problems the code is meant to solve.