Not to argue that code bloat is a problem, but the concept of writing things in any dialect of Forth makes me cringe.<p>I played with Forth. Sure you can do complex things without parenthesis, but if you squeeze something complicated into a single line equation, it will be <i>harder</i> for a human to follow than if you use parenthesis.<p>The original article also says &quot;It&#x27;s never clear how efficiently source will be translated into machine language,&quot; which is complete garbage: Most modern processors were designed <i>precisely</i> to optimize for the kinds of control and data structures that C creates, and C (though NOT C++) has close to a one-to-one mapping from code you write to assembly language output.<p>A key exception is those infix equations, which C can reorder in ways that are <i>more</i> optimal than a naive developer writing Forth would create, so this hardly seems like a recommendation for Forth.<p>This is all orthogonal to whether bloat exists or is a bad thing. I think that bloat exists and is a bad thing primarily because developers are some combination of lazy, unskilled, or pressured to complete features on constant deadline. And honestly, in most cases it&#x27;s probably all three, though I would guess anyone reading HN is mostly afflicted with the last.