> Have you ever looked at how useless Chuck Moore's stuff is?
I've seen someone well known in the Forth community say something like that to Chuck. I think he said "what can I do with that?"
If GA144 is useless, it's only because it has not been put to good use, in my opinion. I think it was more-or-less his answer too, IIRC.
I work with system-on-chip or system-on-modules. You know, the ARM-based chips with tons of peripherals. I also worked with similar chips before the ARM era.
The complexity of these chips is as of today, absurd. I/O is multiplexed to make the chip usable for various things, but one has to configure all of them and watch out for conflicts. Then there's also zillions of configurable clocks in order to reduce the power consumption. Solutions to problems that spawn new problems, not in the "divide and conquer" style, unfortunately. This resulted in "device tree" configuration in Linux, a runtime configuration system, because CPU companies excrete a new variant every week.
Maybe I fool myself, but I can see a GA144 bit-banging IRDA, LCD, SPI, etc. in a much more efficient and flexible way.
> (2010) is a fairly interesting experience from someone on the outside trying to work in the same way. It… didn't work that well.
And here in 2025 there's still Forth-based companies alive, like MPE or Forth, Inc.
More specifically, this author writes,
[...] it was harder than we thought. Presumably that was partly the result of not reading "Stack Computers: the new wave", and not studying the chip designs of Forth's creator Chuck Moore, either. I have a feeling that knowledgable people would have sneered at this machine: it was trivial to compile Forth to it, but at the cost of complicating the hardware.
Implementing a stack-based processor without reading the literature on them is a bit foolish, don't you think? The rest is in the same vein; I can see why a person who was essentially a Forth newbie had a bad experience with this kind of project. If this article "debunks" Forth, it is by showing that just because something it is simple, doesn't mean it is easy. Because the world is not simple and simplifying is much harder than let Complexity loose.
I've seen someone well known in the Forth community say something like that to Chuck. I think he said "what can I do with that?"
If GA144 is useless, it's only because it has not been put to good use, in my opinion. I think it was more-or-less his answer too, IIRC.
I work with system-on-chip or system-on-modules. You know, the ARM-based chips with tons of peripherals. I also worked with similar chips before the ARM era.
The complexity of these chips is as of today, absurd. I/O is multiplexed to make the chip usable for various things, but one has to configure all of them and watch out for conflicts. Then there's also zillions of configurable clocks in order to reduce the power consumption. Solutions to problems that spawn new problems, not in the "divide and conquer" style, unfortunately. This resulted in "device tree" configuration in Linux, a runtime configuration system, because CPU companies excrete a new variant every week.
Maybe I fool myself, but I can see a GA144 bit-banging IRDA, LCD, SPI, etc. in a much more efficient and flexible way.
> (2010) is a fairly interesting experience from someone on the outside trying to work in the same way. It… didn't work that well.
And here in 2025 there's still Forth-based companies alive, like MPE or Forth, Inc.
More specifically, this author writes,
[...] it was harder than we thought. Presumably that was partly the result of not reading "Stack Computers: the new wave", and not studying the chip designs of Forth's creator Chuck Moore, either. I have a feeling that knowledgable people would have sneered at this machine: it was trivial to compile Forth to it, but at the cost of complicating the hardware.
Implementing a stack-based processor without reading the literature on them is a bit foolish, don't you think? The rest is in the same vein; I can see why a person who was essentially a Forth newbie had a bad experience with this kind of project. If this article "debunks" Forth, it is by showing that just because something it is simple, doesn't mean it is easy. Because the world is not simple and simplifying is much harder than let Complexity loose.