
Low Fat Computing - peter_d_sherman
http://www.ultratechnology.com/lowfat.htm
======
peter_d_sherman
Excerpt:

"His programming style is thoughtful. He thinks about the problem a lot and
writes very little code. He thinks it through again and rewrites the code. He
objects to letting too much code accumulate from historic reasons and likes to
rewrite. _He is the most productive programmer I have ever seen yet he has
only written about 15K of code in the last fifteen years._ He has rewritten it
a number of times. It is quite amazing and has almost no fat. The people who
buy or sell six figure VLSI CAD software sometimes get very upset by his ideas
of giving away his ideas and tools so that children could play a VLSI CAD game
under OK on their workstation in a mouse and simulate and print state of the
art chip designs."

(Note: 0K is probably a typo... the author probably meant 10K... but either
way, _that 's small_...)

~~~
eesmith
[https://yosefk.com/blog/my-history-with-forth-stack-
machines...](https://yosefk.com/blog/my-history-with-forth-stack-
machines.html) gives an often-referenced (9 submissions to it on HN) counter-
commentary to Jeff Fox's essay.

> The tiny VLSI toolchain from the epigraph? I showed Chuck Moore's
> description of that to an ASIC hacker. He said it was very simplistic – no
> way you could do with that what people are doing with standard tools.

> But Chuck Moore isn't doing that, under the assumption that you need not to.
> ...

