&gt; 6 years ago, I rewrote 30 000 lines of C++ code in 1000 lines of Ruby.<p>(...)<p>&gt; Code bloat is indeed a recurrent problem.<p>But in your example, you&#x27;re still depending on thousands (millions?) of lines of BIOS, OS, library, runtime code.<p>It&#x27;s so many orders of magnitude different than the point Moore is making -- and also, more <i>subtly</i> different: it&#x27;s not like Forth system don&#x27;t have library&#x2F;OS code -- but eg. fitting a rich editor&#x2F;IDE and OS on a floppy is quite different from eg: Ruby. It&#x27;s a completely different mindset.<p>Even if something like Ruby does a lot of things out of the box, if you were to strip it down to a subset that only allowed to be used as a caluclator repl, it&#x27;d still be quite complex compared to a Forth system (just think about all the code need to handle keyboard input, and talking to the monitor over VGA&#x2F;HDMI etc).<p>None of that invalidates your point, that code bloat is a problem, I just think it highlights that there are different <i>kinds</i> of bloat.<p>Somewhere between colorForth and developing in in a &quot;traditional&quot; language with a &quot;traditional&quot; IDE on a &quot;traditional&quot; OS, we find things like Project Oberon and Smalltalk-80. Or VPRI&#x27;s recent effort to create a full drivers-through-gui-up-to-and-including-applications system in 50kcloc total, making aggressive use of DSLs to manage the complexity.