This year for #adventofcode, all the languages I was interested in playing with felt like they were gonna be a lot of work to learn and actually solve things in. I didn't feel quite up to it this year so I hacked out day 1 in #QB64 - which is a delight but hardly new, QBasic is the first language I coded in!

But then @nihilazo started poking around in retroforth. Forth was high on my list but I didn't know what flavor to go with, so I gave retro a run, and it's nice, just enough bells and whistles to be approachable.

After porting over my initial #QB64 solution to Forth and tearing my hair out over variable declarations, I took a fresh run at it with stacks in mind, and ended up with what I think is a pretty nice, tidy solution. Especially nice was that when I needed to clean up the stack to do the full solution rather than leave the whole list in memory, it was literally removing one word. Fun! Yay fedi folks!

https://gitlab.com/cincodenada/advent-of-code-2021/-/blob/main/day1.forth

#adventofcode2021 #forth #stackbasedlanguages #retroforth #programming