4 ms·

Chuck Moore (Inventor of the language FORTH)'s blog

32 points by plinkplonk 17y ago

plinkplonk 17y ago
I found some of the entries (specifically the last) very poignant. Maybe this is what happens to a genius who is too much out of the mainstream?
- jacquesm 17y ago
  Chuck is an absolutely amazing guy. Read up on his 'homebrew' cad system to lay out chips, it is quite a lesson in how strongly a user interface can influence a process. TILs (threaded-interpreted-languages) have a very natural aspect to them, almost as if that is how you are supposed to develop software. In spite of that, actually doing it is pretty hard, one of the reasons why forth never took off as a mainstream language. Still, in embedded control it is fairly common, mostly because it is one of the easiest to bootstrap high level languages.
  - joe_the_user 17y ago
    Elsewhere in the site: Keyboard Continuing my experiments with keyboards, I currently prefer using 27 keys to provide the 48 characters needed. These are the home keys of a standard 101-key keyboard, allowing the other 74 to be ignored. The assignment of the keys changes, with the current one displayed on-screen at lower right. It's pleasantly easy to type while referring to the display. These keys minimize finger travel, as close to Dvorak's arrangement as 27 keys permit. They are used as function keys (menu selects) for applications. The only text that needs to be typed is when editing source code. Other arrangements are possible. Including, gulp, standard qwerty. Wow...
    - jacquesm 17y ago
      Yep. legend has it he had a chair with who triplets of keys taped to the armrests to control the cursor and place the gates by 'chording', using a system he called 'Okad'. http://www.colorforth.com/gates.htm http://www.colorforth.com/gates.htm one hand would control the cursor, the other the placement of the gates or wires. Would be nice if someone could corroborate or disprove that, I always thought it completely matched the rest of the stories about Chuck Moore so I give it a good chance of being true.
  - kragen 17y ago
    Are you saying you've seen a detailed description of OKAD's user interface somewhere? I haven't, and I'd love to read it. Chuck doesn't seem to want to release it.
    - jacquesm 17y ago
      I was 'into forth' a good bit in the mid 80's, I worked together with a german programmer that really 'grokked' it (Lothar, his biggest dig at me was to call 'C' a 'great' language, by which he meant 'so verbose that it takes a lot of keystrokes to do simple stuff, to tease him I wrote a Forth in C ;) ), I was the newbie learning little by little. We got some pretty hot forth hardware to play with (first chip of the 'Novix' line, pre-production) and we did neat stuff with it. (until someone dropped a dime onto the experimental board when it was powered up that is, after that I had to pull some long nights coding a C replacement of our OCR code to save a demo... those were the days :) ). Anyway, during the run up to this we got all kinds of good stuff on what was going on with the design of the chip, and my colleague Charly had some direct contact with Chuck, the stories about Okad come from him. Charly was pretty good with the routing packages on our PDP-11 himself but he revered Chuck. See my other post in this thread for some more details. edit: iirc there was something about the Novix that was classified, I remember having to sign a bunch of documents about it being 'strategic'. I don't remember the details though.
      - arakyd 17y ago
        Is that Charley the Charley Shattuck mentioned in the 7/21 entry at http://www.ultratechnology.com/blog.htm http://www.ultratechnology.com/blog.htm? Looks like he's still working with Chuck. Lucky guy. The best thing about Forth is that it's the distilled result of decades of iteration on a complete programming environment by a great programmer. I don't know of any other examples of this. The worst thing about Forth is that it will probably die with Chuck and be mostly lost.
        kragen 17y ago
        Well, there's ColorForth, the environment Chuck uses, which I think is used by Chuck and another person or two. That really might be lost. Then there's Forth, the huge family of languages, including an ANSI standard. There's no risk that it will be lost within the next few centuries, unless the human race disappears.
heyadayo 17y ago
The first post is actually heavily edited from its original, last night. He cut out about 2 paragraphs where he talked about the "3 whiskeys" hey drank, as well as a problem that he has that the internet might be able to help with. (No specifics) I'm impressed that he basically kept the same spirit of the post though instead of just deleting the whole thing. I wonder what prompted the original post though.
- plinkplonk 17y ago
  "he cut out about 2 paragraphs where he talked about the "3 whiskeys" he drank" It was there an hour ago, when I submitted this, as were a few sentences about how hard it was to hit the right keys on the keyboard with "3 whiskeys" inside him. Coupled with the note about attempting to raise some money and failing to led my comment about it being poignant. Maybe he just woke up sober and didn't like what he'd typed when he was a little intoxicated.:-) It was fine writing. Too bad he felt the need to delete it. (but understandable, blogging while (tending to) drunk might be too ...interesting )
  - kragen 17y ago
    Now that I see he was OK the next day, I don't feel bad for laughing so hard at it. Maybe he worries that it would cause people to think badly of him, but in my case, anyway, it just reveals a more human, vulnerable side, which doesn't diminish my respect for his intellect in the least. It said: Hi. I'm at the cabin. Have had 3 whiskeys. It's been a hard day. And it's really hard to type. I talked to mortgage consultant Craig today, about raising money on my Incline Village property. No joy. I drank my whisky at my Yuba River outlook. Very peaceful. My insight was that I need to use this web access to seek a solution to a dilemma. You can help. I'll get back to you. Walking back from the Yuba River outlook, I encountered a deer leg. Something killed a deer and brought its leg there. How ephemeral we all are. I brought to the cabin 1/8 cord of oak firewood. It was delivered to my house, I loaded it onto the Jeep and drove it here. Tomorrow I'll stack it. You know, this keyboard is almost unusable after 3 whiskeys. Hit the wrong key and funny things happen. That does not happen with the colorForth editor. You know, dealing with File Manager on the Earthlink website is just as keystroke prone. It took me many tries and much confusion to post this comment. I just got a beep. Have no clue what it means
borism 17y ago
now go read and upvote "Chuck Moore: Geek of the Week" http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=745294 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=745294 to the top. I think Chuck really desereves it!

32 points by plinkplonk 17y ago

I found some of the entries (specifically the last) very poignant. Maybe this is what happens to a genius who is too much out of the mainstream?

jacquesm 17y ago
Chuck is an absolutely amazing guy. Read up on his 'homebrew' cad system to lay out chips, it is quite a lesson in how strongly a user interface can influence a process. TILs (threaded-interpreted-languages) have a very natural aspect to them, almost as if that is how you are supposed to develop software. In spite of that, actually doing it is pretty hard, one of the reasons why forth never took off as a mainstream language. Still, in embedded control it is fairly common, mostly because it is one of the easiest to bootstrap high level languages.
- joe_the_user 17y ago
  Elsewhere in the site: Keyboard Continuing my experiments with keyboards, I currently prefer using 27 keys to provide the 48 characters needed. These are the home keys of a standard 101-key keyboard, allowing the other 74 to be ignored. The assignment of the keys changes, with the current one displayed on-screen at lower right. It's pleasantly easy to type while referring to the display. These keys minimize finger travel, as close to Dvorak's arrangement as 27 keys permit. They are used as function keys (menu selects) for applications. The only text that needs to be typed is when editing source code. Other arrangements are possible. Including, gulp, standard qwerty. Wow...
  - jacquesm 17y ago
    Yep. legend has it he had a chair with who triplets of keys taped to the armrests to control the cursor and place the gates by 'chording', using a system he called 'Okad'. http://www.colorforth.com/gates.htm http://www.colorforth.com/gates.htm one hand would control the cursor, the other the placement of the gates or wires. Would be nice if someone could corroborate or disprove that, I always thought it completely matched the rest of the stories about Chuck Moore so I give it a good chance of being true.
- kragen 17y ago
  Are you saying you've seen a detailed description of OKAD's user interface somewhere? I haven't, and I'd love to read it. Chuck doesn't seem to want to release it.
  - jacquesm 17y ago
    I was 'into forth' a good bit in the mid 80's, I worked together with a german programmer that really 'grokked' it (Lothar, his biggest dig at me was to call 'C' a 'great' language, by which he meant 'so verbose that it takes a lot of keystrokes to do simple stuff, to tease him I wrote a Forth in C ;) ), I was the newbie learning little by little. We got some pretty hot forth hardware to play with (first chip of the 'Novix' line, pre-production) and we did neat stuff with it. (until someone dropped a dime onto the experimental board when it was powered up that is, after that I had to pull some long nights coding a C replacement of our OCR code to save a demo... those were the days :) ). Anyway, during the run up to this we got all kinds of good stuff on what was going on with the design of the chip, and my colleague Charly had some direct contact with Chuck, the stories about Okad come from him. Charly was pretty good with the routing packages on our PDP-11 himself but he revered Chuck. See my other post in this thread for some more details. edit: iirc there was something about the Novix that was classified, I remember having to sign a bunch of documents about it being 'strategic'. I don't remember the details though.
    - arakyd 17y ago
      Is that Charley the Charley Shattuck mentioned in the 7/21 entry at http://www.ultratechnology.com/blog.htm http://www.ultratechnology.com/blog.htm? Looks like he's still working with Chuck. Lucky guy. The best thing about Forth is that it's the distilled result of decades of iteration on a complete programming environment by a great programmer. I don't know of any other examples of this. The worst thing about Forth is that it will probably die with Chuck and be mostly lost.
      - kragen 17y ago
        Well, there's ColorForth, the environment Chuck uses, which I think is used by Chuck and another person or two. That really might be lost. Then there's Forth, the huge family of languages, including an ANSI standard. There's no risk that it will be lost within the next few centuries, unless the human race disappears.

heyadayo 17y ago

The first post is actually heavily edited from its original, last night. He cut out about 2 paragraphs where he talked about the "3 whiskeys" hey drank, as well as a problem that he has that the internet might be able to help with. (No specifics) I'm impressed that he basically kept the same spirit of the post though instead of just deleting the whole thing. I wonder what prompted the original post though.

plinkplonk 17y ago
"he cut out about 2 paragraphs where he talked about the "3 whiskeys" he drank" It was there an hour ago, when I submitted this, as were a few sentences about how hard it was to hit the right keys on the keyboard with "3 whiskeys" inside him. Coupled with the note about attempting to raise some money and failing to led my comment about it being poignant. Maybe he just woke up sober and didn't like what he'd typed when he was a little intoxicated.:-) It was fine writing. Too bad he felt the need to delete it. (but understandable, blogging while (tending to) drunk might be too ...interesting )
- kragen 17y ago
  Now that I see he was OK the next day, I don't feel bad for laughing so hard at it. Maybe he worries that it would cause people to think badly of him, but in my case, anyway, it just reveals a more human, vulnerable side, which doesn't diminish my respect for his intellect in the least. It said: Hi. I'm at the cabin. Have had 3 whiskeys. It's been a hard day. And it's really hard to type. I talked to mortgage consultant Craig today, about raising money on my Incline Village property. No joy. I drank my whisky at my Yuba River outlook. Very peaceful. My insight was that I need to use this web access to seek a solution to a dilemma. You can help. I'll get back to you. Walking back from the Yuba River outlook, I encountered a deer leg. Something killed a deer and brought its leg there. How ephemeral we all are. I brought to the cabin 1/8 cord of oak firewood. It was delivered to my house, I loaded it onto the Jeep and drove it here. Tomorrow I'll stack it. You know, this keyboard is almost unusable after 3 whiskeys. Hit the wrong key and funny things happen. That does not happen with the colorForth editor. You know, dealing with File Manager on the Earthlink website is just as keystroke prone. It took me many tries and much confusion to post this comment. I just got a beep. Have no clue what it means

borism 17y ago

now go read and upvote "Chuck Moore: Geek of the Week" http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=745294 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=745294 to the top. I think Chuck really desereves it!