minimalism ala Dr. Ting

[jfox@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (Jeff Fox)]

Dear MISC readers,

Leo said:

>> Dr. Ting has a one man company which he runs in his spare time....
>> [etc. etc.]
>
>In other words, Dr. Ting delights in selling shoddy products with shoddy
>documentation and shoddy support.

No disrespect intended, he loves it.  I recently realized that most
people think we both have the same idea of minimalism.

To Ting minimalism is bootstrapping an absolute minimal subset of 
Forth and nothing else on a machine with minimal transistors that
were laid out with the minimal tools and also using
minimal documentation that has been minimally proofread and 
minimally debugged chips on minimally designed and minimally
tested circuit boards by someone with minimal experience and
if they are lucky minimum support.

Honestly, that is Dr. Ting's idea of fun.  Replace most of the
minimalism words in the above sentance with NO words and it describes
what Dr. Ting and those of us developing new chips have to
do bo to bootstrap from nothing to do anything on every new
chip.

Dr. Ting wants to push someone into Forth enlightenment as soon
as possible.  ;-) That is his idea of minimalism and it makes
him incredibly productive.  Who else publishes one new book
and a new Forth system every month in his spare time, works
a job, and goes to college? 

I always wanted to propose a "programming challenge" based
the kind of problems that we have to deal with constantly
in bootstrapping silicon into Forth systems.  It would
be fun.

Here is the diskette.  This program is your processor.  Here
is a typical description of what is in there.  Of course
we are not telling you what is in there.  Your callenge
should you take it me Phelps is to write a program to do
this simple thing. 10 points for that and extra points
for correcting the documenation that you were given.

If they can design the tools to do that and solve those
kinds of problems they are doing the kind of problems that
we have to deal with.  Finding obscure hardware bugs is
so much harder than finding obscure software bugs. Everyone
will have to deal with poor documetation.

We could put in lots of really subtile sorts of problems.

If someone were lucky they might figure out an error in
the documentation and get a point.  Some might get a couple.
A few would solve the problem by working around most
of the bugs and few of them would even figure out some
of those hardware bugs or mistakes in the documentation
and get extra points.  I think it should be setup that
way.  most people would get 0 and then some 1s and 2s
and a very few 10s, 11s, to 15s.

There might be a few people who have been solving these
sorts of problems every month for ten years might get
closer to the possible 100 points on the test.

If you also had to write all of your tools from scratch on
part of a ten year old eForth it would the perfect test
for Dr. Ting.  This is his definition of minimalism.

I love Fat Forths.  I just hate FAT.  These are not mutually
exclusive things.  I want everything (functionally not the ANShit)
in my system. I want everything you have in a professional
tools with all the optimized cool stuff we want. I just want
mine 1000x smaller than yours.  Don't worry that is the whole
idea of our tiny machine and Machine Forth.  We want all the
same stuff we just want it 100 to 1000 times smaller and
10 to 10000 times faster than with ANSFAT.

I like minimal unneeded FAT.  I like minmal work.  I like minimal
insanity.  I want maximum documentation and support and features.
If everything is 1000x bigger and more complicated than it
needs to be you can never get good documentaion. You will never
get minimal work or minimal insanity.

That is my idea of minimalism.

>That is one way to run a business.  In contrast, see how Neal Bridges
>sells, documents, and supports Quartus Forth:
>
><http://www.interlog.com/~nbridges/>

Sure but Ting has about 1000 products.  It is unbelieveable.  And
they may only be $15 to $25 on the average they offer a lot for that.
I have lots of them and I found them very helpful. I find it
hard with NO documetation. His was the first.

There is only one semiprofessional P21 product.  I did that as
a favor to Dr. Ting and the whole MISC project as well as
my own understanding.  I still people who want to play to get
my P21Forth on a tested board with good documentation and demos
and examples and hundreds of works or CODE and lots of neat stuff
unless your definition of fun is the same as Dr. Ting's.

I think it is like pulling yourself up by your bootstraps when
you are naked.  It is a nice trick if you can learn to do it.
But getting up and running can be a little frustrating too.
It is a little like understanding a koan.  I like Dr. Ting a lot.

Kind of reminds me of trying to pull yourself up when you
have not had the money to make a pay phone call for a couple
of weeks.  a neat trick if you can learn to do it.

Jeff Fox