Quite a few applications have been written in Forth, too many to enumerate here. Some are described on our web site, http://www.forth.com. One very familiar example is the hand-held package tracking device FedEx uses to track ~3 million packages every day. The NEAR space probe that landed on an asteroid a year or so ago had most of its instruments written in Forth. Telephone answering systems, construction estimating systems, antenna control systems,... (very long list).
Having worked on several 20+ programmer projects (not all men, actually), I can say that Forth works great there. Some years ago a company came to us with a project in trouble: a team of 35 programmers in 3 years had generated >300,000 lines of code in a control system involving 500 computers and 30,000 points. The software (Fortran, assembler) was x5 too slow, and didn't work. We started from scratch in Forth with a 15-programmer team, and passed performance tests in 12 months (x10 faster than the scrapped code), and passed all acceptance tests in 18 mos. That system is still in use.
I will say that Forth programming teams tend to be smaller, because you can do much more with a smaller team. But sharing code is definitely not a problem.
Of course, team members have to know or learn Forth. Would you want to do a C project with non-C programmers? Fortunately, Forth is easy to learn. In the project above, over half the programmers didn't know Forth at the start of the project, but they learned fast and became quite productive.
RE "reading an expression from a Forth program out loud to another programmer": we do it all the time. It works great. Of course, the other programmer has to know Forth. Try reading C out loud to someone who doesn't know C!
It's true that Forth isn't advertised nearly enough. But it is standardized: an ANSI Standard for Forth was published in 1994, and is followed by all commercial and most non-commercial implementations.
Stack mistakes are easy to diagnose and fix, and at least you won't get in trouble with missing parens or braces! In short, every language has its characteristic "programmer traps". Forth at least is interactive and very easy to debug thoroughly.
As to "storing tokenized source code right in the executable," I'm unaware of any Forth that does this. It's certainly easy to find one that doesn't: most of them! So your secrets are safe.
Forth is a language invented by Chuck Moore in the early 70's. It's the only language developed specifically for embedded systems, and that's still where it's most commonly and profitably used. It produces extremely compact programs, with performance comparable to C (assuming a good implementation) on conventional processors. Of course, it's blazing fast on Forth processors such as Chuck designs!
There's more information (including an extended history published at an ACM conference) on our web site, www.forth.com.
ShBoom is now marketed as the "Ignite 1" by Patriot Scientific, www.ptsc.com. They market it as a Java chip, not a Forth chip, doubtless because they thing the Java market is larger. But it runs Forth extremely fast, much faster than Java. FORTH, Inc. (my company) offers the SwiftX Forth cross-compiler for it (see www.forth.com for info). This site also has benchmarks comparing it with other processors.
Books that better reflect current Forth usage include The Forth Programmer's Handbook (available from Amazon and www.forth.com) and Forth Application Techniques (www.forth.com). Handbook is a fairly technical introduction and reference, and Application Techniques is an introductory tutorial. Neither has cute cartoons, unfortunately.
Confession: I was a co-author on both.
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Quite a few applications have been written in Forth, too many to enumerate here. Some are described on our web site, http://www.forth.com. One very familiar example is the hand-held package tracking device FedEx uses to track ~3 million packages every day. The NEAR space probe that landed on an asteroid a year or so ago had most of its instruments written in Forth. Telephone answering systems, construction estimating systems, antenna control systems, ... (very long list).
Having worked on several 20+ programmer projects (not all men, actually), I can say that Forth works great there. Some years ago a company came to us with a project in trouble: a team of 35 programmers in 3 years had generated >300,000 lines of code in a control system involving 500 computers and 30,000 points. The software (Fortran, assembler) was x5 too slow, and didn't work. We started from scratch in Forth with a 15-programmer team, and passed performance tests in 12 months (x10 faster than the scrapped code), and passed all acceptance tests in 18 mos. That system is still in use. I will say that Forth programming teams tend to be smaller, because you can do much more with a smaller team. But sharing code is definitely not a problem. Of course, team members have to know or learn Forth. Would you want to do a C project with non-C programmers? Fortunately, Forth is easy to learn. In the project above, over half the programmers didn't know Forth at the start of the project, but they learned fast and became quite productive.
RE "reading an expression from a Forth program out loud to another programmer": we do it all the time. It works great. Of course, the other programmer has to know Forth. Try reading C out loud to someone who doesn't know C!
It's true that Forth isn't advertised nearly enough. But it is standardized: an ANSI Standard for Forth was published in 1994, and is followed by all commercial and most non-commercial implementations. Stack mistakes are easy to diagnose and fix, and at least you won't get in trouble with missing parens or braces! In short, every language has its characteristic "programmer traps". Forth at least is interactive and very easy to debug thoroughly. As to "storing tokenized source code right in the executable," I'm unaware of any Forth that does this. It's certainly easy to find one that doesn't: most of them! So your secrets are safe.
Forth is a language invented by Chuck Moore in the early 70's. It's the only language developed specifically for embedded systems, and that's still where it's most commonly and profitably used. It produces extremely compact programs, with performance comparable to C (assuming a good implementation) on conventional processors. Of course, it's blazing fast on Forth processors such as Chuck designs! There's more information (including an extended history published at an ACM conference) on our web site, www.forth.com.
ShBoom is now marketed as the "Ignite 1" by Patriot Scientific, www.ptsc.com. They market it as a Java chip, not a Forth chip, doubtless because they thing the Java market is larger. But it runs Forth extremely fast, much faster than Java. FORTH, Inc. (my company) offers the SwiftX Forth cross-compiler for it (see www.forth.com for info). This site also has benchmarks comparing it with other processors.
Books that better reflect current Forth usage include The Forth Programmer's Handbook (available from Amazon and www.forth.com) and Forth Application Techniques (www.forth.com). Handbook is a fairly technical introduction and reference, and Application Techniques is an introductory tutorial. Neither has cute cartoons, unfortunately. Confession: I was a co-author on both.