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Chuck Moore, Extreme Programmer

cs.uni.edu

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Re: Chuck Moore, Extreme Programmer

#71

Post by HumanDrivenDev »

acjohnson55 wrote: post #46

> 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".

I think a degree of skepticism is required with NIH. I'm probably not going to roll my own crypto, or high performance statistical routines. But if something invented elsewhere "solves" a problem that really isn't rocket science, or if it's a framework - I will almost always avoid it.

Re: Chuck Moore, Extreme Programmer

#72

Post by woodrowbarlow »

com2kid wrote: post #21
feelin_googley wrote: post #16

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…

> 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 program, which was no more than 1-2MB in size. That might have been more to do with how hard publishing code to the web was back then, an internal p…

i don't buy it. dpkg was released in 1994, and that was designed to tame the nest of people passing around small executables on the internet.

Re: Chuck Moore, Extreme Programmer

#73

Post by HumanDrivenDev »

tailrecursion wrote: post #62
jacquesm wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Forth is no different from other languages in that you can write good code and bad code in it. The 'Forth way' is not always intuitive and in that it fails from the purpose of being a language friendly to newcomers, it's a bit like being dumped on someone else's farm without power, water or sewage and a pile of tools and raw materials for you to use. Taking a step down like that when coming from a modern environment…

Forth IS different in one way, from most other languages. The syntax doesn't mark which parameters are being passed to which functions. In C for example you have parentheses and commas that provide that information to the reader. The marking of parameters-to-functions helps most readers read a program and determine its meaning. In some cases it doesn't matter which parameters are going to which functions, and the rea…

I've often thought about an editor for a stack/concatenative language that makes the arity of words clearer. like when you select a word it highlights which of the previous words in the definition it's consuming.

I don't know if it would work for forth - too low level - but for something like Factor I could see it being really useful.

Re: Chuck Moore, Extreme Programmer

#74

Post by evincarofautumn »

Cyph0n wrote: post #35
trhway wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Given the absence of "higher-level" constructs, the resulting OS will never be as complex as something like an NT kernel i wonder whether you've worked with Forth - in my view of Forth (spent 1987-89 mostly in Forth running on 8088 clone based terminal of USSR clone of IBM 360, so Forth is my second language after mandatory Pascal and the first true "computer" love really) what you said is a huge advantage and natur…

That was an analogy attempting to explain what OKAD does. The kernel represents the circuit being designed, while the assembler represents the OKAD toolchain. The goal of the analogy was to demonstrate that OKAD is not suitable for designing large circuits, just like using assembly to write a modern kernel is not practical.

Well, presumably it’s not meant to be suitable for designing large/complex circuits, but rather to solve just the specific problems that Moore had when he wanted to make a chip. That’s an essential part of Forth philosophy: write only and exactly what you need. Forth itself is designed this way, to be the minimal useful tool you can bootstrap in a few dozen instructions on a chip with almost no resources.

Re: Chuck Moore, Extreme Programmer

#75

Post by [deleted] »

pmoriarty wrote: post #18
andrewla wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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've heard of the wonders of Forth for many years -- about how it was just as good at metaprogramming as Lisp, how it was very powerful and yet extremely light-weight, about how you could run it on bare metal, and write your own OS and utilities in a fraction of the time it would take in other, more well-established languages, and so on. I got really excited about it, and when I finally started learning it, I had ver…

[deleted]

Re: Chuck Moore, Extreme Programmer

#76

Post by RingwormOne »

lobf wrote: post #61
RingwormOne wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd imagine life experience for people living in small town Iowa is very different from that of people living in major urban centers on the coasts. You're assuming that if someone is white and not rich or below the poverty line that their life experience is equivalent to that of other white not rich/not poor people. That's a false assumption. Diversity should be celebrated regardless of whether it's within or between…

The idea that you're calling middle class suburban experience "diversity..." woo boy.

Again, small town Iowa is very different from elsewhere in the country. It's not what you would expect on a site focused on tech where most probably hail from coastal urban or suburban enclaves.

Of course if you refuse to believe anyone who is white could contribute to diversity of a community, well then I guess you're just racist.

Re: Chuck Moore, Extreme Programmer

#77

Post by hoosieree »

derefr wrote: post #32
teddyh wrote: post #7

Quote from ( http://www.ultratechnology.com/1xforth.htm ): “ I wish I knew what to tell you that would lead you to write good Forth. I can demonstrate. I have demonstrated in the past, ad nauseam, applications where I can reduce the amount of code by 90% percent and in some cases 99%. It can be done, but in a case by case basis. The general principle still eludes me. ”

I'm not surprised that the general principle that helps Moore reduce his code size eludes him. Authoring something blinds you to your own style—both to your mistakes, and to your brilliances. It's why prose writers can't be their own editors: you need someone who wasn't in your head during the writing process to actually be able to see what's ended up on the page, rather than just seeing reminders that immerse you ba…

Are the original and rewritten-by-Moore versions available for any of these projects?

Re: Chuck Moore, Extreme Programmer

#78

Post by com2kid »

woodrowbarlow wrote: post #72
com2kid wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 program, which was no more than 1-2MB in size. That might have been more to do with how hard publishing code to the web was back then, an internal p…

i don't buy it. dpkg was released in 1994, and that was designed to tame the nest of people passing around small executables on the internet.

> i don't buy it. dpkg was released in 1994, and that was designed to tame the nest of people passing around small executables on the internet.

The problem is corporate policy. In the yee old days, publishing content to MSDN was not easy. Bill Gate's rant[0] on this topic gives some insight.

Grabbing small EXEs is now a lot easier. See: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/

[0]http://blog.seattlepi.com/microsoft/2008/06/24/full-text-an-...

Re: Chuck Moore, Extreme Programmer

#79

Post by lobf »

weberc2 wrote: post #70
lobf wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I take it to mean any place that isn't urban but also isn't rural.

It's pretty close to rural. 40K citizens and corn fields a mile or so from campus. Not sure what your overarching point is though--what's wrong with remarking on the improbability of a submission from a tiny university in Iowa?

I grew up in a town of 6k and we were the big one in 20 miles. 40k is suburban IMO.

Edit- and I was ridiculing the idea that the mention of a wealthy, homogenous suburb indicates how inclusive this community is. Pretty much every story here deals with things from a young, white, wealthy perspective.

Re: Chuck Moore, Extreme Programmer

#80

Post by lobf »

RingwormOne wrote: post #76
lobf wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The idea that you're calling middle class suburban experience "diversity..." woo boy.

Again, small town Iowa is very different from elsewhere in the country. It's not what you would expect on a site focused on tech where most probably hail from coastal urban or suburban enclaves. Of course if you refuse to believe anyone who is white could contribute to diversity of a community, well then I guess you're just racist.

>Again, small town Iowa is very different from elsewhere in the country. It's not what you would expect on a site focused on tech where most probably hail from coastal urban or suburban enclaves.

He lives outside of a town of 40k, it's not particularly small. For reference I grew up in a town of 6k- I'm not trying to play small-town olympics here but he's hardly from the boonies. The University of Iowa is there...

>Of course if you refuse to believe anyone who is white could contribute to diversity of a community, well then I guess you're just racist.

Heh, what a way to frame my words... who would think that? Nobody would, which is why strawmen are useless rhetorical tools.

My point is that on a website dominated by suburban, white, middle class software developers, a reference to suburban Iowa is not diverse. It's insane to think that a reference to that community shows how inclusive HN is. It's extremely exclusive.

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