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Chuck Moore, Extreme Programmer

cs.uni.edu

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Re: Chuck Moore, Extreme Programmer

#61

Post by lobf »

RingwormOne wrote: post #56
lobf wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

White middle class suburbanites aren't well represented on internet forums? Don't mean to be negative, it's just insane how insular and specific this community is and how little recognition that is given here.

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.

Re: Chuck Moore, Extreme Programmer

#62

Post by tailrecursion »

jacquesm wrote: post #33
pmoriarty wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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 reader can get a sense or enough of a sense, from the choices of names the programmer made. You can get by without knowing.

But in many cases it is vital to know which parameters are being passed to which subroutine, in order to understand an algorithm. For most people, having to puzzle and re-puzzle this out while the program is being studied is too much extra work or extra ambiguity, or, they just don't buy having to put up with it, given the ready alternatives.

Those specific markings -- parentheses around function calls -- makes a big difference in readability overall.

Re: Chuck Moore, Extreme Programmer

#63

Post by ansible »

sitkack wrote: post #52

Charles' extreme minimalism philosophy aligns well with Forth, but it can work in many compact environments. Scheme and Lua come to mind. It is difficult at first but powerful and liberating to realize that one has full agency over their program. With other runtimes, there is no possible way to either understand the whole thing, or effectively fork it and fix what you want. Not so with Lua, Forth or a small Scheme. I…

The economy of Lua's design has impressed me.

You've got just one data structure, the table, and from that you can implement just about anything else... efficiently.

Re: Chuck Moore, Extreme Programmer

#64

Post by lobf »

weberc2 wrote: post #54
lobf wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

White middle class suburbanites aren't well represented on internet forums? Don't mean to be negative, it's just insane how insular and specific this community is and how little recognition that is given here.

Cedar Falls isn't a suburb. 2 hours to Des Moines, 3 to Minneapolis, 5 to Chicago.

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

Re: Chuck Moore, Extreme Programmer

#66

Post by eric_the_read »

jacquesm wrote: post #33
pmoriarty wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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…

I think the important distinction-- and the reason that I never got very far in Forth myself-- is that with Forth, you don't have the pile of tools and raw materials, but instead a forge and some ingots of various metals. You really do often end up rebuilding even things you'd normally consider simple library functions in most other languages.

Re: Chuck Moore, Extreme Programmer

#67

Post by buckminster »

Nokinside wrote: post #45

If our technological civilization collapses and we need to recreate it from scratch, Chuck Moore could do significant part of that.

Off topic, but we can't. All the readily available sources of energy have been used. As someone else said, this is literally the last great civilization. Best not screw it up!

Re: Chuck Moore, Extreme Programmer

#68

Post by Avshalom »

Cyph0n wrote: post #23
Avshalom wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Oh N.B. I just looked it up the GA144 is fabbed at 150nm

Re: Chuck Moore, Extreme Programmer

#69

Post by HumanDrivenDev »

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 this quote: "The problem with object-oriented languages is they've got all this implicit environment that they carry around with them. You wanted a banana but what you got was a gorilla holding the banana and the entire jungle." - Joe Armstrong

What Joe Armstrong (who I admire) complains about is actually what I love about OO languages. And for me that's the true essence of what OO is, and how it differs from non-OO. People keep trying to frame OO in terms of mutability (completely orthogonal) or C++/Java coding practices (C++ doesn't define OO because it has objects, anymore than it defines FP because it has lambdas).

The real difference, the real paradigm shift is in data + functions vs objects. And I maintain that objects are more powerful and better idea than data + functions. The banana can't be peeled without the gorillas opposable thumbs.

Re: Chuck Moore, Extreme Programmer

#70

Post by weberc2 »

lobf wrote: post #64
weberc2 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cedar Falls isn't a suburb. 2 hours to Des Moines, 3 to Minneapolis, 5 to Chicago.

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?
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