Forth: The programming language that writes itself: The Web Page
1–10 of 89 posts
Re: Forth: The programming language that writes itself: The Web Page
#2really great read, thank you for putting this all together
Re: Forth: The programming language that writes itself: The Web Page
#3Related Chuck Moore talk: "Programming a 144 Computer Chip to Minimize Power" (2013)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0PclgBd6_Zs
How Forth powers ultra-low power computers:
"GreenArrays is shipping its 144-core asynchronous chip that needs little energy (7 pJ/inst). Idle cores use no power (100 nW). Active ones (4 mW) run fast (666 Mips), then wait for communication (idle)."
Re: Forth: The programming language that writes itself: The Web Page
#4A great introduction is the book Starting Forth [0].
It has the most charming illustrations I've ever seen in a text book.
Re: Forth: The programming language that writes itself: The Web Page
#5Related Chuck Moore talk: "Programming a 144 Computer Chip to Minimize Power" (2013) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0PclgBd6_Zs How Forth powers ultra-low power computers: "GreenArrays is shipping its 144-core asynchronous chip that needs little energy (7 pJ/inst). Idle cores use no power (100 nW). Active ones (4 mW) run fast (666 Mips), then wait for communication (idle)."
I genuinely wonder if this topology won't make a come back in the coming years.
Re: Forth: The programming language that writes itself: The Web Page
#6Ah, what beautiful paradigms there are which we toil away without. Retro (a modern Forth) looks very interesting. The textbook Thinking Forth is near SICP in terms of opening your mind to a new paradigm.
Is anyone using Forth in production these days with stories to tell?
Re: Forth: The programming language that writes itself: The Web Page
#7anecdata (and warning some people might not like that domain brought here), there's a mini vm in bitcoin that a subset of forth
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Script
I just learned that this week
Re: Forth: The programming language that writes itself: The Web Page
#8Ah, what beautiful paradigms there are which we toil away without. Retro (a modern Forth) looks very interesting. The textbook Thinking Forth is near SICP in terms of opening your mind to a new paradigm. Is anyone using Forth in production these days with stories to tell?
Probably not. It turns out that it doesn't map to modern computer processors terribly well.
It's an amazing and elegant language, but anything that does register-to-register operations is always going to be faster than register-to-memory.
Re: Forth: The programming language that writes itself: The Web Page
#9Ah, what beautiful paradigms there are which we toil away without. Retro (a modern Forth) looks very interesting. The textbook Thinking Forth is near SICP in terms of opening your mind to a new paradigm. Is anyone using Forth in production these days with stories to tell?
Probably not. It turns out that it doesn't map to modern computer processors terribly well. It's an amazing and elegant language, but anything that does register-to-register operations is always going to be faster than register-to-memory.
Stack code can be mapped to register code trivially if you impose some restrictions (each word has a static effect and both branches of a conditional have the same effect). Then lowering to SSA form performs an “abstract interpretation” where evaluating a word pops SSA values from a “abstract stack”, creates an SSA node and pushes its output values on the stack.
Re: Forth: The programming language that writes itself: The Web Page
#10I learned Forth when it was the only language that had an interpreter than ran on PalmOS. So you could write and execute it on your PalmPilot while you were bored in class in the 90s.