Josh, if you did take the time to put together a collection of links, it might be helpful to my imaginary historian. Hosting an independent archive to supplement the newsgroup backlog would be more helpful -- what will become of ultratechnology.com, for example, now that Jeff Fox is gone? Most helpful would be spending several months tracking down the old-timers and interviewing them in person.
I didn't have in mind technical lore as such: I agree that most of that stuff is more-or-less obvious in context, and more-or-less irrelevant out of context. There's more to history than tech trivia. I'm much more curious about the culture itself, and I see little point in trying to separate language from culture. Who used Forth, for what, and when? How many Forth users were there, and where? Where did that extreme-YAGNI aesthetic come from, besides Chuck Moore's personal style? What did Forth users agree and disagree on? Where does the language survive today (besides Open Firmware and some old spacecraft)? Why did C eventually become dominant? Was there ever any hope for Forth as a "mainstream" language? -- Max On Sat, Dec 8, 2012 at 5:19 AM, Josh Grams <[email protected]> wrote: > > >> 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. > > > >I would like to read such book. > > There are bits and pieces out there; Chuck Moore has written a couple of > things and Jeff Fox has a bunch of essays. And the old Forth Dimensions > newsletters are fun reading. Mostly it's a culture of YAGNI taken to > extremes, on the assumption that it's cheap to extend the functionality > when you find you actually need it. And a culture of distrusting > academic work and complex compilers and having the programmer make as > many decisions as possible. > > I've been interested in Forth for about 10 years; I came to computing > via Basic and then x86 assembly language, and when I was 16 (1996) I > started asking myself what was the simplest compiler I could build that > would get me significantly more power than assembly language and came up > with something remarkably similar to Forth (it was a pleasant surprise > discovering the actual Forth language 5 years later). So I tend to > think that most of the stuff is obvious if you're coming from that > direction, and I haven't come up against any code or prose from the > Forth folks that makes me feel differently. There *is* several decades > of people working on it, so there are a bunch of interesting tricks. > And of course YMMV. > > I could come up with a bunch of links if anyone is interested... >
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