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Re: [colorforth] Hello - and where to begin?

Dear Ray,
Thank you for the welcome. It is good to see your website back now (I had the broken link in my bookmarks from the last time I looked at colorForth). 


Can you please elaborate on the machine that you acquired? I am also
interested in finding such a machine. I am planning a trip to Europe
this spring and would love to have a machine that I could rely on in
the event that I am called on to demonstrate colorforth.
It's a Gateway SOLO2150. Part No. 3500673, manufactured 08/06/00, and came with Windows 98. I can't remember what the processor is, and Partition Magic has messed up the Windows boot so I can't look at the present. 


I will share this. At one point, I thought that my interest in
colorforth was totally irrational and without merit. I even thought my
interest was due to a condition I am currently undergoing treatment
for.

I had it well explained to me by someone I respect in the forth
community. To put his experience in context, he had never tried the
system, but suffice it to say that he could read the code and well
understand the individual systems. He could also well elaborate how
these systems interrelated. His points were well made and not
incorrect. And yet I could not help my interest even after such a well
stated argument.

I have reversed my thinking yet again, and re-enter the community
refreshed. Irrational is the OS that requires the specifications of
last years machine just to run this years OS, requiring more machine
to do anything else but OS stuff.

I'm starting to think that colorforth is not for programmers, it's for
designers and explorers. Programmers like programming environments
that do the work for them and that's why programmers create such
systems for other programmers. Designers on the other hand, like it
when the thing they use to design something actually turns into that
something they are designing, in a form where you couldn't possibly
remove another piece and still get the functionality that is required
to solve the specific, as opposed to a general, problem.

Modeling clay for your machine/mind connection.

Chuck has left us with a framework. Any piece of which is suspect. All
the pieces together forming a unique whole.

I still say to that other forther that I respect so much, "You have
not used it, you don't know, and I can only tell you how to make love,
not how to feel it". :-) or things that equal that.

Once someone gets past the build of the system, obviously a hard thing
to ask an experience forther, if one were to start with the interface
and the paradigm and forget the encryption method ...

( which is quite replaceable and I've never found reason to... but
after all it is...or frankly any portion of the system is, we see
keyboards go from Chuck-vorak to qwerty all the time...)


... or the underlying system, and think about the way one solves
problems, and how one goes about reducing those solves into tighter
and more definitive factorings, using only the simplest of
constructions...

This is colorforth. The quicker picker upper
Are there any other computer languages that arouse such philosophical discourse and soul searching? 

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