Im using Robo 3t for mongo stuff. I think there’s also compass, but I don’t like it so much.

@todo I'm a Forther. Have you checked out factor? Also freeforth is pretty interesting as far as how lean and mean it can be. LBForth has interesting metacompilation (in lisp IIRC). Nothing will probably teach you Forth like writing your own metacompiler. As far as something to get yourself over the hump, maybe try writing something like a game. Say a card game. First make a lexicon for drawing boxes on the screen. Then make one to render the spots on the cards. Then for the face cards. Then make one to randomize a deck array. Then to draw the cards out, etc... When you're done you should be able to write the card game as a fairly simple and human-like description of the game's rules. Just start at the bottom and start writing words that you think will come in handy. Don't worry too much about how its all going to come together. It just will. Try and keep your definitions short, like approximately of 7 - 12 words (usually about 2 lines of code in horizontal style). Try and keep your stack depth down to about 3-4 parameters max so your ordinary stack manipulation words will work. Keep a thesaurus handy so you can come up with just the right word for what each function does. Keeping the definitions short gives you lots of test points and somewhat documents your code.