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I've worked with another Forth disciple in the late 80s. He was on a PC, and thought that my Mac GUI was neat. So he wrote a portable GUI framework from scratc

by atotic 9y ago

I've worked with another Forth disciple in the late 80s. He was on a PC, and thought that my Mac GUI was neat. So he wrote a portable GUI framework from scratch in Forth that had dialogs, buttons, pull down menus, text inputs, graphics, mini Mac clone. It was magic. I think it was way under 100K. After that, I really wanted to become a Forth wizard. I tried, but it never clicked, my code was very clumsy, write only. I admired my coworker as an almost alien intelligence. I think it really works well for coders spiritually close to hardware.

Chiba-City 9y ago
FWIW, I wrote a graphing menuing system with primitive scalable fonts (for Arabic) in Turbo Pascal in '89 on US taxpayer dimes for live variable twiddling graphing of demographic simulations. It was all roll our own back then on 512K PC's. I implemented a Common Lisp compiler packaged in a DLL for Windows before the net took off. Some kind of "hardware and syscalls up" exercise should be part of more CS programs. It is a great experience to engineer truly reusable (and reused) code before the mosh pits of corporate labors. Good times make for useful memories.