A lot of the power of Forth comes from its metaprogramming capabilities and having the compiler available at runtime, all wrapped in a tiny footprint. Similarly to Lisp, it empowers one to explore a problem domain without getting in the way. These concepts are alien to C which is downright hostile to exploratory programming.
If you really want to understand the genius of Forth and its creator, I suggest reading everything that Chuck Moore put down in writing starting with "Programming a problem-oriented language".
A lot of us today, being bogged down in the sort of tedium-inducing programming that pays the bills, tend to forget that programming languages are (or should be!) primarily about expressing ideas. Forth is still one of the best languages to do that in.
Yeah. Pretty much agree with everything here. I'd rather encourage starting with the book Thinking Forth, though. It's not written by Moore but has some commentary from him included in it.
I'd even suggest learning a little Forth to people even if it didn't have its interactive nature (which again I don't actually find useful in my own limited embedded work, there's really no "explore" phase as the problems are all straightforward -- contrary to software I write in CL or even Java). I had a friend in college who for a project made his own language and got it working on an embedded system (I think via compiling to C, but I don't recall exactly), but it was just a boring Algol-like somewhat inspired by Ruby. That pattern has shown up again and again around the world though. Forth is one of the handful of languages that shows what expressive options there are that aren't just transparently Algol-like.
If you really want to understand the genius of Forth and its creator, I suggest reading everything that Chuck Moore put down in writing starting with "Programming a problem-oriented language".
A lot of us today, being bogged down in the sort of tedium-inducing programming that pays the bills, tend to forget that programming languages are (or should be!) primarily about expressing ideas. Forth is still one of the best languages to do that in.