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I don’t think so. There are many ways to describe how a mind altering experience with LSD would change how you relate to yourself and your environment. I am cur

by nequo 2y ago

I don’t think so. There are many ways to describe how a mind altering experience with LSD would change how you relate to yourself and your environment. I am curious how Forth changed parent’s approach to programming.

immibis 2y ago
Probably in a similar way to learning Haskell, assembly, Erlang, data-oriented design, 4k demo programming, or any other thing that is unconventional enough that your normal patterns don't work and you are forced to expand the set of ways you know how to program.
- nequo 2y ago
  This is both vague and speculative though. Vague because you have made no specific claims that could be evaluated one way or the other. Speculative because you have said nothing about Forth. You cannot make engineering decisions based on "it'll change how you program." There are several concrete examples of turning imperative code into pure monadic code that contains less boilerplate and is less noisy with Haskell's do notation. Exhaustiveness checking, encoding invariants in types, those all have good examples that one can read and agree or disagree with. Surely there are concrete examples that one can give about Forth too?
  - skydhash 2y ago
    It's metaphysical. Like learning a foreign language widen your perspective. It's a particular insight you gain about the act of programming that makes you realize that you've been boxing yourself to a very small imperative/oop space. Writing C code feels like writing a rule book, writing java feels like designing a lego set, writing lisp feels like writing proof, writing prolog feels like writing puzzles. Writing forth feels like writing a dictionary, then after that you write a few sentences. They're different feeling, but forth is one of the most flexible as you can go up and down from the most basic units to the high level ones. As another comment has mentioned, you can program forth where the basic units are elements from another language, and construct a dsl/dictionary out of it. Then switch the basic units while retaining your business logic for a faster implementation without a full rewrite.
    - immibis 2y ago
      Not just the realization you were boxed into a space, but also knowledge of stuff inside a different box. The more boxes you have the ability to access, the better.
  - saulpw 2y ago
    The creator of Forth wrote this: > I wish I knew what to tell you that would lead you to write good Forth. I can demonstrate. I have demonstrated in the past, ad nauseam, applications where I can reduce the amount of code by 90% percent and in some cases 99%. It can be done, but in a case by case basis. The general principle still eludes me. -- Chuck Moore https://www.ultratechnology.com/moore4th.htm https://www.ultratechnology.com/moore4th.htm You might appreciate other quotes from the above page.
- 7thaccount 2y ago
  Not OP, but I would only partially agree with that statement. Sure, learning all those things is mind altering. If you only know Java or Python...Haskell is very unusual. However, the Forth experience and reading about legends like Chuck Moore (at least for myself), just gave me this feeling that most of our problems come from software bloat and having these infinite abstraction levels where nobody ever truly understands what in the world is going on anymore. Such a system is ironically more efficient from a developer's perspective (at least until you run into weird bugs and edge cases) as developers just basically glue together libraries and only need surface level understanding to get something running. Another option might be to design your own hardware and then a simple forth system on top of that which exactly solves the problem and nothing else. The implementor would have laser level understanding of the design choices. Of course, there are other issues such as how to maintain such a unicorn, even if it is beautiful and elegant. Today, we have lovecraftian horrors with huge swaths of people working together to keep all the abstraction levels working together and hope there aren't any leftpad incidents.
  - fuzztester 2y ago
    >having these infinite abstraction levels where nobody ever truly understands what in the world is going on anymore s/infinite abstraction levels/Rube Goldberg contraptions/
    - 7thaccount 2y ago
      Lol. Probably a more apt description.
  - immibis 2y ago
    Low level "machine sympathetic" programming is just one type. If you restrict yourself to it, you'll be no better than the programmer who's restricted to any other type. All these abstractions didn't spring out of nowhere - in many cases they make for very flexible software that is cheap to create. Go learn both ends. And the middle. And the weird outliers.
    - 2y ago
sph 2y ago
You can describe LSD, or a novel programming paradigm, just as well as you can describe Beethoven's 5th symphony in words. The amount of lost bits of information makes the explanation totally worthless, even though you technically can explain it. The point is it's a waste of time. You won't understand LSD, Beethoven or Forth until you have tried them.

by nequo 2y ago

immibis 2y ago

Probably in a similar way to learning Haskell, assembly, Erlang, data-oriented design, 4k demo programming, or any other thing that is unconventional enough that your normal patterns don't work and you are forced to expand the set of ways you know how to program.

nequo 2y ago
This is both vague and speculative though. Vague because you have made no specific claims that could be evaluated one way or the other. Speculative because you have said nothing about Forth. You cannot make engineering decisions based on "it'll change how you program." There are several concrete examples of turning imperative code into pure monadic code that contains less boilerplate and is less noisy with Haskell's do notation. Exhaustiveness checking, encoding invariants in types, those all have good examples that one can read and agree or disagree with. Surely there are concrete examples that one can give about Forth too?
- skydhash 2y ago
  It's metaphysical. Like learning a foreign language widen your perspective. It's a particular insight you gain about the act of programming that makes you realize that you've been boxing yourself to a very small imperative/oop space. Writing C code feels like writing a rule book, writing java feels like designing a lego set, writing lisp feels like writing proof, writing prolog feels like writing puzzles. Writing forth feels like writing a dictionary, then after that you write a few sentences. They're different feeling, but forth is one of the most flexible as you can go up and down from the most basic units to the high level ones. As another comment has mentioned, you can program forth where the basic units are elements from another language, and construct a dsl/dictionary out of it. Then switch the basic units while retaining your business logic for a faster implementation without a full rewrite.
  - immibis 2y ago
    Not just the realization you were boxed into a space, but also knowledge of stuff inside a different box. The more boxes you have the ability to access, the better.
- saulpw 2y ago
  The creator of Forth wrote this: > I wish I knew what to tell you that would lead you to write good Forth. I can demonstrate. I have demonstrated in the past, ad nauseam, applications where I can reduce the amount of code by 90% percent and in some cases 99%. It can be done, but in a case by case basis. The general principle still eludes me. -- Chuck Moore https://www.ultratechnology.com/moore4th.htm https://www.ultratechnology.com/moore4th.htm You might appreciate other quotes from the above page.
7thaccount 2y ago
Not OP, but I would only partially agree with that statement. Sure, learning all those things is mind altering. If you only know Java or Python...Haskell is very unusual. However, the Forth experience and reading about legends like Chuck Moore (at least for myself), just gave me this feeling that most of our problems come from software bloat and having these infinite abstraction levels where nobody ever truly understands what in the world is going on anymore. Such a system is ironically more efficient from a developer's perspective (at least until you run into weird bugs and edge cases) as developers just basically glue together libraries and only need surface level understanding to get something running. Another option might be to design your own hardware and then a simple forth system on top of that which exactly solves the problem and nothing else. The implementor would have laser level understanding of the design choices. Of course, there are other issues such as how to maintain such a unicorn, even if it is beautiful and elegant. Today, we have lovecraftian horrors with huge swaths of people working together to keep all the abstraction levels working together and hope there aren't any leftpad incidents.
- fuzztester 2y ago
  >having these infinite abstraction levels where nobody ever truly understands what in the world is going on anymore s/infinite abstraction levels/Rube Goldberg contraptions/
  - 7thaccount 2y ago
    Lol. Probably a more apt description.
- immibis 2y ago
  Low level "machine sympathetic" programming is just one type. If you restrict yourself to it, you'll be no better than the programmer who's restricted to any other type. All these abstractions didn't spring out of nowhere - in many cases they make for very flexible software that is cheap to create. Go learn both ends. And the middle. And the weird outliers.
  - 2y ago

sph 2y ago

You can describe LSD, or a novel programming paradigm, just as well as you can describe Beethoven's 5th symphony in words. The amount of lost bits of information makes the explanation totally worthless, even though you technically can explain it. The point is it's a waste of time. You won't understand LSD, Beethoven or Forth until you have tried them.