[ColorForth] Let's talk philosophy

[Jeff Fox <fox@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Jack Johnson wrote:
> Funny you mention that.  I was in a museum last 
> weekend and saw that exact thing with an engine 
> from the turn of the century.  One engine, a dozen
> different farm implements, and a lot of belts.

I think one of the main difference between what
people call our "toy" computers and "real"
computers (PCs) is that the real ones have one
motor and a million belts and clutches 
attached to a million different applications.

Most people don't want, can't use, and don't need
a million different attachments, but with a PC
that is the way you have to go.  The anology
explains part of why our stuff is 1000 times
smaller, cheaper and simpler and yet can
compete on performance on jobs where the tool
you want is attached to the free motor.

> what
> would Chuck's Perl programs look like?  

It's like all the times that I asked Chuck
"How would do ...?" and his answer was
"I wouldn't."

> > > [directed to Chuck] Why colorForth?
> > > What brought you here?  Not only "Where do you want to go
> > > today?" but where do you want to be tomorrow?  And how
> > > do you get there from here?
> >
> > I actually think that Chuck has addressed those issues
> > for us.
> 
> Actually, that was directed at you, at everyone.  

OK.  Well I would be deligted to give my take on it.

> Chuck has his own reasons
> for ending up here, and those are well documented.  But 
> what does Jeff Fox see in colorForth that keeps him 
> coming back for more?

I have been focused on the chips, specing out what
we want them to do, what is the best way to do it.
Chuck would bring his expertise and provide his
set of contraints for what was going to be hard
or easy in hardware with his approach.

I simulated thousands of variations in hardware and
software and fed the design information back to
Chuck.  To do that I also had  to focus on the
software for these chips.   You just cannot
separate hardware and software issues since they
are all about each other.

I have used OKAD to assist in CAD work, but I didn't 
write it and I know the tiniest amount of what
Chuck knows about it.  But I have been a user and
have discussed design issues with Chuck.

Chuck has been focused on CAD.  Most of his ideas
on MachineForth evolved in the ShBoom and early
MISC phase.  I was involved by then and studied
the original ShBoom manuals before getting deeply
involved and becoming Chuck's second custom
VLSI client.  I was deeply involved the work
on P21 because it was the parent of my chip.

So with my focus on using and selling the target
hardware I was deeply involved in the target software.
Chuck's focus on VLSI CAD and the associated work
on a PC.  Thus we made a good team, he the specialist
on designing and using the CAD tools with me as an
assistant in CAD and to carry the load of the
target software.  I became Chuck's software apprentice
and assistent and I was the first person that he
hired when started up iTV with a couple of other
guys in 95.

As I spent years programming the chips, teaching
others, managing other programmers on these
projects, and consulting with Chuck's other
clients at times as a team with Chuck I sort
of became the MISC software person.  Chuck gave
me a certifcate at iTV, 

"Jeff Fox"
"Forth"

I could see that everything in Chuck's ideas about
Forth fit perfectly with everything in Chuck's
ideas about hardware.  You know what most other
people thought about his ideas about Forth and
hardware.  They couldn't make any sense of them
at all.

As I spent a decade as a professional MachineForth
programmer, manager, and teacher I fell behind
because Chuck moved on to ColorForth.  I felt
that wanted to keep up, but there was still a
need for me to continue my role as the MachineForth
software person.  Who else was going to explain
this stuff  to the world.

Hence, the megabytes of HTML and gigabytes of
videos etc. etc.  Hence also all the heat about
me being a "cultist" "liar" "snake oil salesman"
"idiot" "unthinking siccophant" "mindless parrot"
etc. etc. in places like c.l.f from the same
group of a dozen nuts and ANS Forth salespeople
for a dozen years.

But I did try hard to follow, understand, and
explain to others the ideas behind colorForth.
I have repeated that to understanding this
stuff makes most sense if you follow Novix to
RTX to ShBoom to P21 to F21 to c18 to 25x to
1000000x etc.  Because if you do that you
see that Forth got simpler and simpler as
Chuck got the hardware and software in sync.

But if you went from F83 to ANS Forth in that
same time, over the last fifteen years, which
is really very very little change except for
decoupling from the closeness to hardware and 
decoupling from the power of simplicity
you are still doing, as Chuck has said, Forth
the way he was doing it twenty years ago.

(actually you took a branch IMHO off toward
coventional computing, away from Forth, and
have been going that way for the last fifteen
years like most other people and Chuck is
just too diplomatic to say that.  He can't
really because he is the partriarch.  I am
not.  I am just his latest apprentice.

Each apprentice gets their own version of the
art.  The Forth that I learned from Chuck is
very different than the Forth that Elizabeth
Rather learned from Chuck as his first.)

Eventually I did take the leap to follow the
colorForth path, which I came to from ten years
of MachineForth.  Aha.  Aha is my take on
colorForth taken to the max on the chips 
designed to exploit these ideas.  It is like
a post-colorForth design because it actually
decouples the compiler from the editor and
makes a colorForth editor just a module
and one could optionally use an ANS Forth
editor with the same tiny Aha compiler.

It is not a mix of Chuck' ideas about Forth,
ColorForth, his chips, and what works on a
Pentium.  Aha is mostly Chuck's software ideas
with a few of mine thrown in for experimental
purposes and mixed with our chip ideas.

I cannot run Chuck's colorForth on any of my
machines.  But I will implement my own version
of colorForth, on F21.

I am a participant in the colorForth mailing
list because I am interested in the subject.
I also think that I can help some other people
to understand the ideas.

My own real interests in software are simulations
of subsonic aerodynamics for racecars and aircraft
and my flying robots and I may implement that code
in Chuck's colorForth modeled on his OKAD II.

My other interests are AI, expert systems, neural
nets, law of form, tiny Forth-Lisp-Prolog-Occam
mixes, speech recognition, speaker recognition,
natual language processing, interactive voice,
visual recognition, cognitive neuroscience,
parallelism, parallel hardware, parallel compilers,
Forth, and the Forth  hardware that I have created 
for this stuff.  That is my software background.  
There is good overlap with Chuck's background so 
we work well together (also because Chuck says 
that I get his ideas) and it is also the reason 
that we don't see *everything* the same way.

And of course Chuck is DEEPLY into VLSI CAD
rather than all that software stuff that I
mentioned.

Jeff Fox
------------------------

To Unsubscribe from this list, send mail to Mdaemon@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx with:
unsubscribe ColorForth
as the first and only line within the message body
Problems   -   List-Admin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Main ColorForth site   -   http://www.colorforth.com