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I'm excited to announce the completion of "Forth: The programming language that writes itself: The Web Page (Charles H. Moore and the pursuit of simplicity.)" :squee:

Recommended for fans of: historical computing, programming languages, and space technology.

http://ratfactor.com/forth/the_programming_language_that_writes_itself.html

#forth #RetroComputing #history


Forth: The programming language that writes itself: The Web Page

An exploration of the evolution and meaning of the Forth programming language and its context in history.
ratfactor.com
#history #retrocomputing #forth
in reply to ratfactor

Alan Sill
Alan Sill
• •
I wrote a beam steering code in Forth for my thesis experiment at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center. It worked very well for this purpose but the problem was that if you went back to work on it after a while, you had to drink at least as much coffee as when you last worked on it to be able to understand it again! Very condensed and elegant in design and implementation.
This entry was edited (1 year ago)
in reply to Alan Sill

ratfactor
ratfactor
• •

@AlanSill Wow, that sounds very related to Chuck Moore's work at the SLAC. When did you do your thesis experiment?

(Agree with the coffee metric. Reminds me of the Brian Kernighan quote: "Everyone knows that debugging is twice as hard as writing a program in the first place. So if you're as clever as you can be when you write it, how will you ever debug it?")

@Alan Sill
in reply to ratfactor

Alan Sill
Alan Sill
• •
This was in the early 1980’s when fixed target high energy physics was still being done at SLAC. We used a modernized version of the spectrometers and setup that had been used 20 years earlier by Taylor, Kendall, et al. to discover quarks! Our setup was more sophisticated, however. This code ran on an LSI-11 with a real-time operating system and made beam adjustments about 30 times per second. It was one of many ways we pushed that equipment to provide better performance.
in reply to R. L. Dane :debian: :openbsd:

Devine Lu Linvega
Devine Lu Linvega
• •
@RL_Dane I've read this already 😀 I feel this has been out for a while, no?
@R. L. Dane :debian: :openbsd:
in reply to Devine Lu Linvega

ratfactor
ratfactor
• •

@neauoire @RL_Dane Yes and no!

It's complicated: I put the slides up in February. Then I started writing the annotated "Web Page Edition" a month later and did several editing passes. All of it has been public, so it was possible to read it at any of the various stages of development.

The original slides contained about 3,500 words. This thing is 33,200 words. 🤯

@Devine Lu Linvega @R. L. Dane :debian: :openbsd:
in reply to ratfactor

Devine Lu Linvega
Devine Lu Linvega
• •
@RL_Dane I think by the time I came across it you were pretty close to being finished. It's a really nice piece btw, I think I've told you before. It touches up on everything. I've sent it to at least 10 people already at this point.
@R. L. Dane :debian: :openbsd:

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