I joined the RTX team at Harris Semi after grad school. The only devt environment they could offer customers was (as I remember it) completely Forth-based - the barrier to entry was awfully steep, even for greenfield projects.
I learned Forth by myself with Pygmy Forth (no Internet, no book, just the docs of that system) when I was 15 or so. It was my third language after Basic and assembler.
I believe that the challenge of Forth is not to learn it, but to unlearn the rest. It is difficult to forget what you know. It's difficult to forget about dynamic memory allocation, classes, local variables, type checking... And frustrating too.
It's like video games. When I was a kid/teen, I could do over and over again a level until I succeeded. Not today. I would lose patience and bitch about the poor game/level design because I think I know better. I am more often wrong than right on this.
Adult programmers and engineers are like that. They think they know better, so when something is difficult for them, they blame it on the language. They don't have the really open mind kids have. If there's a barrier to entry, it is not in Forth.
I think I agree with you. Forth was (fortunately IMO) the first language I really grokked after undergrad. Before that it was assembly, Apple Basic & (shudder) Fortran. I had zero exposure to CS 101. So Forth warped my brain in all the right ways.
