FORTH programs are also DSLs

I explained in the last entry how I see Lisp programs as domain specific languages (or rather, how Lisp as a language encourages the creation of all programs as DSLs). When reading the explanation by Richard M. Jones for his minimal FORTH compiler, I was reminded that FORTH plays in the same league. You write your program by building new words based on the already existing words, and try to capture the problem domain with them. In the end, you should have a minimal set of words describing your program. This is just another description of a domain specific language.

When talking about programming languages, I have no real idea how to look at Smalltalk. On the one hand it uses a very small set of keywords (just 5) and concepts (namely message passing and assignment), and builds everything from there. But I cannot see how it encourages the writing of programs as more specific problem descriptions the way Lisp and FORTH do it.