[HN Gopher] bigFORTH (1997)
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bigFORTH (1997)
Author : RalfWausE
Score : 86 points
Date : 2024-01-08 12:51 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (bernd-paysan.de)
(TXT) w3m dump (bernd-paysan.de)
| notamy wrote:
| Never mind, I'm blind, please ignore.
| sph wrote:
| Why? "Source code last change: 31mar2023"
| notamy wrote:
| Oh, I missed that entirely. I only saw
|
| > Current version is bigFORTH 2.4.0, Minos 1.4.0, from
| 22mar2010.
| drpossum wrote:
| We've sadly really lost a core aspect of web design.
| mhd wrote:
| I immediately want to install the Enlightenment WM with that
| old steampunk theme again and do some POV-RAY.
| mkovach wrote:
| I still got nostalgic when I see web pages like that. I miss
| them.
| CyberDildonics wrote:
| Are you talking about this page? It looks atrocious. If it was
| just text without background images it would be readable and
| simple.
| throwaway17_17 wrote:
| I think the opinions on the linked page are likely to be
| split across age lines. If you were active on the internet
| prior to 2004 sites like this one will spark nostalgia in
| many, however, if your primary experience with the internet
| starts with the iPhone, Facebook, etc then you will merely
| see poor design and ugly aesthetics. I'm sure this is
| somewhat reductive, but broadly I would suspect I'm correct.
| CyberDildonics wrote:
| It has nothing to do with that, it's just bad design to
| have pattern image backgrounds that make text hard to read
| and add nothing.
|
| There's a reason even small web pages don't look like this
| any more. Pages made like this were people seeing features
| and thinking they should use them without thinking about
| what they were doing. Go back as far as you want,
| professional pages never looked like this.
|
| Even in the days of geocities it was only people's first
| web pages that looked like this. You could excuse people
| for learning to put a .gif in the background and then
| showing it off in the mid 90s. 30 years later there isn't
| any excuse.
| bigfishrunning wrote:
| As a person that's closer to 40 then 30, i love the
| design of that webpage. It makes me feel young again. I
| understand that it's technically bad. I understand that
| there are many ways to make it feel more readable.
|
| I don't care. I miss a time when nobody knew or cared
| about how to design a readable webpage.
| az09mugen wrote:
| It reminds me the old dos game Gods
| https://i.ytimg.com/vi/EhXflDuEnYU/maxresdefault.jpg
| CyberDildonics wrote:
| What you're talking about is nostalgia. The person I
| replied to was saying this is a "core aspect of web
| design".
| schwartzworld wrote:
| Tiled backgrounds? I miss them too.
| rickcarlino wrote:
| I believe BigForth was absorbed into what is now GForth (still
| maintained). See the GForth "pedigree":
| https://www.complang.tuwien.ac.at/forth/gforth/Docs-html/Ori...
| kragen wrote:
| afaik gforth doesn't have bigforth's native-code compiler
| packetlost wrote:
| Probably not, considering it uses gcc as a backend
| avindroth wrote:
| Forth really changed the way I think. I now take notes in a
| Forth-like way. Very underexplored.
| bwestergard wrote:
| Could you say more about what it means to "take notes in a
| Forth-like way"?
| AstroJetson wrote:
| Not sure what it means
|
| carrot soup cookies bread butter cart grocery todo
|
| would be one way :-)
| denmashansa wrote:
| Ok
| oh_sigh wrote:
| On Forth, anyone know how Chuck is doing these days? I haven't
| seen anything from him in almost a decade.
| jhbadger wrote:
| He's still listed as chairman at Greenarrays, which makes chips
| for embedded systems (and a version of Forth is still the
| official development system for them)
|
| https://www.greenarraychips.com/
| fizfaz wrote:
| He sometimes joins meetings of the Forth 2020-Group. The last
| one was meeting #40 on Nov. 11. 2023:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M14tCZiEPkg&t=11670s
| drivers99 wrote:
| I see him in this Silicon Valley Forth Interest Group video
| call from 2023-12-16:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CPqMc4QmUS0
|
| Even better, here's his "fireside chat" from 2023-11-18
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3jJkyc-raJQ
|
| edit: his blog has a few brief announcements occasionally
| https://colorforth.github.io/blog.htm
| kragen wrote:
| thanks, this is wonderful news
|
| sad to see he's running microsoft windows, which i am sure is
| not running on a ga144, and an iphone
|
| but it's wonderful to see he's still alive and still living
| in the mountain cabin and still working on colorforth
|
| this is dispiriting:
|
| > _forth is a lovely language, but you have to be able to
| interface with your hardware. i 've been doing that for 50
| years and i'm tired of it. they keep changing the rules
| faster than i can learn what they are_
|
| i really respect that the most important purpose for his
| clock app is to tell him when the sky will turn beautiful
| golden colors
|
| i wonder if it would be more informative for him to stream
| some live coding rather than just present finished programs,
| because i feel that the essence of forth is the interactive
| experience of using it
|
| a surprisingly hardcore tidbit is (53'40") that colorforth
| context switches between apps by recompiling the new app from
| source. otoh i guess that's what php and streamlit do too
| xelxebar wrote:
| Forth is super cool for embedded work. The normal dev cycle of
| build, burn, not work, tweak, build, burn, repeat is quite slow
| and annoying. It was kind of revolutionary for me to discover
| Mecrisp[0], which demonstrates how can provide a (fast!) language
| that also provides a friggin' repl into your hardware.
|
| The ##forth IRC channel on Libera is quite active. Would
| recommend popping in for anyone interested. The two projects that
| got me interested in Forth are
|
| 1. JonesForth:
| http://git.annexia.org/?p=jonesforth.git;a=blob;f=jonesforth...
|
| Explanation and motivation for the What and Why of Forth and its
| implementation. Well, actually, it's actually an implementation
| in x86 assembly, but the comments are a wonderful exposition and
| intro into Forth.
|
| 2. SmithForth: https://dacvs.neocities.org/SF/
|
| Implementation of Forth in x86-64 _opcodes_. It 's a hand-written
| ELF that implements a Forth. It's simplicity is absolutely
| beautiful.
|
| SmithForth is what pushed me over the edge to really start
| learning x86 assembly and Forth. I started by hand-decompiling
| the SmithForth binary, which was quite an adventure on its own.
|
| [0]:https://mecrisp.sourceforge.net/
| kragen wrote:
| you probably can't use amd64 in embedded work, or even i386
| these days, but i think 'a friggin' repl into your hardware' is
| a good explanation of what's appealing about forth
| actionfromafar wrote:
| Sure you can, lot's of custom x86 boards with vxWorks on them
| out there.
| kragen wrote:
| there are at least some, especially on very old machines
| actionfromafar wrote:
| Not sure what you mean by this. There are Atom-like
| boards, and Core i7 boards with BSPs and everything in
| between. Bringing up a custom system isn't that hard
| either.
| kragen wrote:
| yeah but basically nobody uses them. intel canceled
| edison five years ago
| https://hackaday.com/2017/06/19/intel-discontinues-joule-
| gal...
|
| the comments on that article from people who tried to use
| their boards are scathing
|
| (the link to the not-yet-discontinued curie in that
| article is now a broken link, and the link
| https://communities.intel.com/community/tech/intel-curie
| from https://github.com/arduino/ArduinoCore-arc32, which
| hasn't been updated in 5 years, says 'The core node you
| are trying to access is permanently deleted.' https://www
| .intel.la/content/www/xl/es/products/sku/96282/in... says
| it's discontinued.)
|
| this is very different from 30 years ago when pc104
| boards were all over the place. pc104 is not completely
| forgotten but pc104 and vmebus are pretty well eclipsed
| by raspberry pi, esp32, arduino, gumstix, and plain stm32
| and avr8 designs, increasingly even in non-hobbyist
| designs. can and i2c have displaced isa/eisa and
| sometimes even rs422
|
| so if you are doing embedded work you probably will not
| be able to use amd64 or i386 and thus jonesforth or
| smithforth or stoneknifeforth. but the principles do
| apply
| vanderZwan wrote:
| I think I posted an almost identical reply to you just a few
| days ago, but I'm presuming they linked the x86 examples
| because most people can actually try them without needing
| said embedded hardware
| lebuffon wrote:
| Amazing that this is one person's work.
| NooneAtAll3 wrote:
| where does bigFORTH lay on Big Scale?
|
| https://xkcd.com/2130/
| robomartin wrote:
| Having used Forth professionally for about ten years, the
| language has always held a special place in my heart. I have had
| the experience (fun!) of implementing Forth from nothing in a
| couple of processors (6502 and 68K).
|
| While I do think the language is useful in certain domains, the
| main problem everyone has with it will be finding qualified
| programmers. I've had to convert codebases to C for this reason
| and, back in the day, made a fair bit of money doing this as a
| gun for hire.
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(page generated 2024-01-08 23:01 UTC)