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I once read a short story online that was taken from a computing magazine or similar from several decades ago. It was an elaborate joke about the ordinary meanings of the computing terms “Reverse Polish” and “[FORTH] translator”. does anyone have it bookmarked? (boosts appreciated)
(that is, the meanings that “Reverse Polish” and “translator” would have to an ordinary person, not a 1970’s computer scientist)
aha, I found it. the title should have been easy to remember: “My Life as a Forth Interpreter”
http://bit-player.org/wp-content/extras/bph-publications/CompLang-1986-04-Hayes-Forth.pdf
it’s from 1986. the last time I read it was when it was on Hacker News in 2014 (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7410883)
@hikari It's almost certainly not the article you're looking for, but this has a great explanation of the history plus why the "Reverse" is actually meaningful.
https://hackaday.com/2017/10/24/reverse-polish-notation-and-its-mildly-confusing-elegance/