might fuck around and write a forth
Conversation
Replying to
be sure to properly dive into the rabbit hole and read about Chuck Moore's ideas on minimalism
1
2
Replying to
This was definitely a good read, thanks!
1
1
Replying to
For me Forth is mainly about compression. Starting point is simple (VM or hardware), then the language pushes the programmer towards writing highly factored code. This takes extra effort btw: it's hard to write a good Forth program, but in return you get a small program.
1
Intuitively (hard to articulate) this seems to create a push away from nested data structures (easy to express with random access which is hard in Forth), towards thinking of interpreters and protocols. Akin to the idea to "replace data structures with folds".
There is room to move Chuck's ideas into today's "meta heavy" world, and I think he's right to push this into the hardware realm. Gut feeling is that these ideas make most sense at the level of HW/SW co-design. It's the right time, since FPGAs are so cheap these days.