OT: on IDEs and code writing on steroids

[bearophile]

Walter Bright:
> The 6502 is an 8 bit processor, the 8088 is 16 bits. All 8 bit 
> processors were a terrible fit for C, which was designed for 16 bit 
> CPUs. Everyone who coded professional apps for the 6502, 6800, 8080 and 
> Z80 (all 8 bit CPUs) wrote in assembler. (Including myself.)

Forth interpreters can be very small, it's a very flexible language, you can metaprogram it almost as Lisp, and if implemented well it can be efficient (surely more than interpreter Basic, but less than handwritten asm. You can have an optimizing Forth in probably less than 4-5 KB).

But the people was waiting/asking for the Basic Language, most people didn't know Forth, Basic was common in schools, so Basic was the language shipped inside the machine, instead of Forth:
http://www.npsnet.com/danf/cbm/languages.html#FORTH

The Commodore 64 with built-in Forth instead of Basic may have driven computer science in a quite different direction.

Do you agree?

Bye,
bearophile