I don't know Hugh, but he appears to be a machinist who never outgrew his
typically American blue-collar knee-jerk homophobia, which in turn
alienated him further from the small handful of his Forth-using peers.
His casually hateful comment on comp.lang.forth, to which Josh links, is
much more poignant in light of this blog post, one of Jeff Fox's last:

 http://www.ultratechnology.com/blog.htm#111910

It's not clear to me what's "on topic" on this list anymore, or who's still
reading. But those of us who are foolhardy enough to maintain an emotional
or intellectual investment in fundamentally different ways of thinking
about and practicing computing might want to reflect for a while on what
Jeff had to say there.

We're a minority culture, folks. At best. More realistically, we represent
a few distinct minority cultures and a big handful of unaffiliated
eccentric individuals. We're not going to "change the world" any time soon.
A more realistic goal would be survival in the current regime. This is a
very serious problem which has been, and continues to be, faced by every
distinct "minority group" in the history of civilization. Some manage to
adapt and find relatively safe niches where they can preserve a few of
their vital traditions. Most are crushed into oblivion.

If anyone here is actually serious about the history of computing, they
might consider writing a book about the culture of Forth. Seems to me
there's some valuable material there which is gradually passing out of
living memory.

-- Max

On Fri, Dec 7, 2012 at 5:20 AM, Josh Grams <[email protected]> wrote:

> On 2012-12-07 08:37AM, Eugen Leitl wrote:
> > Forwarded message From Hugh Aguilar <[email protected]>
> > Re: OPERATING SYSTEM ON A FPGA
>
> I don't understand what you want to get out of reposting this here?
> ISTM that the thread on racket-users covers things pretty well...
>
> I think Hugh has a point that Racket would not be suitable for
> development on small microcontrollers.  I don't do embedded at all, but
> I get the impression that it's generally very static, with most data
> structures pre-allocated, or taken from a fixed-size pre-allocated pool.
> It's difficult for me to see how a dynamic language like Racket would
> fit that niche.  But I don't know much about it.  There may be a way to
> allow that kind of low-level control over memory usage.
>
> In general Hugh seems to be a bigot with questionable technical skills;
> e.g. Straight Forth is "straight" as in "no homosexuals allowed"...
>
>
> https://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.forth/msg/bb9040268348ec02?dmode=source&output=gplain&noredirect
>
> --Josh
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>
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