Vera and Forth

Vera and Forth are two programming languages with very different approaches to computatation that act as illuminating contrasts to each other.

There are some similarities. Both work with a core type, for Forth, it's the machine word. For Vera, its the counter. Both work with a global memory structure, shared between their parts. Both are able to fit into -small- CPUs. Both are meant to be toolkits for expressing a problem, which can make them surprisingly high level for their byte-slinging natures.

Forth is seen a kit for a someone to build up to the solution for a problem, piling idosyncracies into a purpose-built vocabulary, negotiating complexity away to better fit the solution into Forth. Left behind are singular artifacts, snapshots of the dev's understanding of the problem, as solved as could be at the time. As Bernd Payson pointed out, if you know one Forth, you know one Forth. The first Forth was condensed out of Chuck Moore's personal approach to solving problems in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Many later Forths, many later stacklangs, would be mostly singular efforts. There are some more communal efforts, gForth and ANS Forth, but they Come Later.

Vera is, to its -core-, an asynchronous language. To start with, it is based on rules that fire if a given state exists, rather than executing linearly. -Once- a rule is fired, the flow of the execution is very strict until it's complete, but it can also be paused at any point. Because it is rule based, rather than sequence based, the behavior of a given ruleset can be patched by using a new ruleset around it, rather than changing the ruleset itself. This enables asynchronous collaboration of code construction. Beyond that, it is a language -very- easily constructed, easier, even, than Forth, which means that many different implementations with small variations are being tried right now, with ideas spreading between them like DNA variations in a bacteria colony. From a point of being minimalistic, Vera might be comparable to Forth, but the development of it, and related Nova things sounds more like the early days of EMACS, when there was a lot of TECO macros getting copied around and standardized