41–50 of 186 posts
The "Do Not Speculate!" idea reminds me of the practice of delivering "the kitchen sink" when only a small program that does one thing would suffice. It reminds me of when, e.g., a 1990s-2000s Windows user needed a small program that does one thing, and in order to get it, the download from Microsoft was an installer with hundreds of megabytes of unneeded binary files. It was not possible to download only the single…
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You're entirely missing the point made by Chuck Moore and by extension probably don't understand why his way of looking at programming and the Forth language in particular are a big deal even this long after their invention. This kind of minimalism and stripping things down to their essence is a powerful tool to allow you to focus on what matters rather than at all those things that don't really matter. If you don't…
> This kind of minimalism and stripping things down to their essence is a powerful tool to allow you to focus on what matters rather than at all those things that don't really matter. If you don't actually need 4 GHz chips and billions of transistors to get the job done then why would you? I agree entirely. I just wanted to point out that it's not accurate to equate what Chuck designed (i.e., OKAD) to a modern EDA to…
I think you subconsciously added the 'modern' in there somewhere and then argued against that.
I want to take a moment to reflect on what a great community HN has. It never ceases to amaze me. The link is from the CS department at the University of Northern Iowa in Cedar Falls, IA. It sounds obscure, but that's my hometown. I grew up a couple blocks away from it. I sat in on classes there. I even know the author's family. That's small town Iowa, for ya. I never thought I would see anything related to that on h…
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> This kind of minimalism and stripping things down to their essence is a powerful tool to allow you to focus on what matters rather than at all those things that don't really matter. If you don't actually need 4 GHz chips and billions of transistors to get the job done then why would you? I agree entirely. I just wanted to point out that it's not accurate to equate what Chuck designed (i.e., OKAD) to a modern EDA to…
Nobody equated that. The time when he made his is decades ago, so obviously nothing from those days compared to a modern EDA toolchain and associated bits and pieces. I think you subconsciously added the 'modern' in there somewhere and then argued against that.
> He wrote his own chip design software and analog simulator
I immediately thought of a modern toolchain. Had I known that this was done decades ago, I might have reacted differently.
Nonetheless, even decades ago, both Cadence and Synopsys likely had pretty advanced tools under development. I may be mistaken though.
The other side of this coin is NIH Syndrome. I've seen that go wrong in all sorts of ways.
One of the key skills of being a great engineer in the real world is exercising good judgment whether to "build or buy".
I want to take a moment to reflect on what a great community HN has. It never ceases to amaze me. The link is from the CS department at the University of Northern Iowa in Cedar Falls, IA. It sounds obscure, but that's my hometown. I grew up a couple blocks away from it. I sat in on classes there. I even know the author's family. That's small town Iowa, for ya. I never thought I would see anything related to that on h…
> References middle-class suburban Iowa > This is truly a place for all. Edit- sorry I reminded you guys that there are other life experiences again.
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I don't know how much of the usual stack it accounts for or if it specifically was used for the GA144 but they're referring to OKAD, often talked about as in hundreds/thousands of lines of colorforth https://duckduckgo.com/?q=Moore+okad+forth&t=fpas&ia=web
Before I put on my cynical hat, I'd like to say that it's pretty impressive stuff for a one-man shop in the 90s. ----- So it seems like OKAD is basically a layout editor, simulator, DRC checker, and GDSII compiler. The simulator uses a very simplistic transistor model that would only work at very old process nodes (>350nm?) due to the low impact of parsitics and leakage. Not even a moderately complex digital chip fro…
Maybe he didn't want to design a moderately complex chip to begin with? His 144 core chip is likely very simple. OKAD may have been sufficient.
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He designed CPUs from scratch using a bare-bones minimal Forth (ColorForth) as his preferred way of writing code. The resulting chipset is utterly fascinating: http://www.greenarraychips.com/
> from scratch This is even understating it -- it's not like he used existing software to lay out the chip, and then ran tests using PSPICE to verify the functionality. He wrote his own chip design software and analog simulator, and designed the chip in his own environment, and created the CPU, the GA144: a working 144-core processor designed to run "ArrayForth", a parallel version of Forth that he designed and autho…
I think that's understating it. I would consider any of those accomplishments to be a monumental undertaking. Combined, it is legendary.
If there is ever any doubt as to the existence of the 100x programmer - I would think this guy is proof. Somebody who creates their own chip design software as a means to creating their own multicore processor to run their own language, faster, is a motivated genius.
> Moore also has a corollary called Do It Yourself!, which encourages you, in general, to write your own subroutines rather than import one a canned subroutine from a library. The other side of this coin is NIH Syndrome. I've seen that go wrong in all sorts of ways. One of the key skills of being a great engineer in the real world is exercising good judgment whether to "build or buy".
Beginner: Learn the basics, be proud of getting something done that works, even though it might not be a useful result.
Experienced: Learn the systems. Figure out which system is more helpful than others. But don't worry too much before you start learning a new system. Even a "bad" system will teach you something valuable. In the end you need to learn far more than one system anyways to progress.
Expert: Learn that no system is perfect and use them freely according to context, maybe create a few yourself. See that even these "bad" systems come in handy once in a while.
Master: Don't bother to get here. Even most freaks won't get here and from those who do most will tell you that they had no choice to do something else and they were just lucky that at least in this area they had talent. You're probably better off than them in general terms. If you want, learn here that is just one system. Welcome to the next abstraction level as Experienced.
(This system about learning is developed by yours truly.)