The programmers who live in Flatland • Hacker News Board

Re: The programmers who live in Flatland

#151

Post by ralphc » Tue, Dec 09, 2025, 5:34 AM UTC

ErroneousBosh wrote: post #113

miohtama wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have several decades of programming experience and would never choose Lisp, unless for funny one pagers. Programming language ergonomics matter and there is a reason why Lisp has so little adoption even after a half a century.

Sadly, much as I love Forth, it's kind of the same thing. It's an awesome language and it's a great way to bring up bare metal to a functional state, but who does that these days? I could probably include Forth as a scripting language in a bigger app, but that app is probably going to want more complex variables than machine word size ints, and fixed-length strings. So, oh dear, Forth's not a great fit for that, and…

The nerdiest project on github sounds like a high bar, what's the project?

Re: The programmers who live in Flatland

#152

Post by ErroneousBosh » Tue, Dec 09, 2025, 9:13 AM UTC

ralphc wrote: post #151

ErroneousBosh wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sadly, much as I love Forth, it's kind of the same thing. It's an awesome language and it's a great way to bring up bare metal to a functional state, but who does that these days? I could probably include Forth as a scripting language in a bigger app, but that app is probably going to want more complex variables than machine word size ints, and fixed-length strings. So, oh dear, Forth's not a great fit for that, and…

The nerdiest project on github sounds like a high bar, what's the project?

I ported Forth to a 1980s sampler, so that you could plug a MIDI cable in and run a special terminal program to write Forth programs on its 6809 processor.

It boots off a floppy disk, so it was really just a case of working out where in the ROM and OS disassembly the entry points were, and making it all fit around the assumptions the ROM makes.

This allowed me to make up a diagnostics disk to check the RAM (a whopping 128kB of sample RAM) and IO are working.

https://gordonjcp.github.io/miragetools/

Now I wouldn't place a bet on it being the nerdiest project on Github, but I suspect it's well up there.

Re: The programmers who live in Flatland

#153

Post by pklausler » Tue, Dec 09, 2025, 4:01 PM UTC

ModernMech wrote: post #150

pklausler wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fortran compilers were historically implemented by hardware vendors in order to sell their hardware, and this still largely holds true across the surviving implementations with the exceptions of GNU Fortran (obviously) and nagfor (commercial s/w product). There's a good reason that Cray Research's software group was initially part of its marketing department.

The compilers were, but Fortran wasn't invented so that hardware manufacturers could sell their wares to scientists.

It was invented so that IBM could sell more gear to the institutions that employed them.