On Mon, Mar 17, 2008 at 10:02 AM, David Brown <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On Mon, Mar 17, 2008 at 09:15:55AM -0700, SJS wrote: > >begin quoting David Brown as of Mon, Mar 17, 2008 at 09:12:31AM -0700: > >[snip] > >> Charles Moore may be brilliant but he doesn't seem to be able to think > >> outside of his very tiny little box. He thinks operating systems are > >> antequated and should go away (as in, we should all just be running forth > >> systems directly on modern hardware). He just doesn't have a very > >> realistic view of the world. > > > >Don't a lot of the Smalltalk and LISP advocates think the same way? > > Charles Moore's reductionism makes things impractical. He eshews things > like memory management, filesystems, and even data types. Both Lisp and > Smalltalk use garbage collected, type-tagged data with no direct pointer > manipulation. >
Chuck Mooore is an unreasonable man. "The reasonable man adapts himself to the conditions that surround him... The unreasonable man adapts surrounding conditions to himself... All progress depends on the unreasonable man." George Bernard Shaw I would argue that there is a dialectic process (yin-yang, if you will) operating. OTOH we have modern OS's with every conceivable service thrwon into them like a kitchen sink. OTOH we have Forth and its cousins that continue to show us what a single really bright guy can do. Now most of us are not that bright nor especially unreasonable. So being practical we simply do not make much of a difference. Believe me, Chuck is quite capable of thinking outside of his box. It is great fun to listen to him rant sometime on almost any topic in modern computing. He is about as far from uninformed as you can imagine. He just does not confuse incremetally adding to the kitchen sink with the job of washing the dishes. His work always has gone by the most direct path possible at the specific application. Forth was built from the get go to enable Chuck to write applications, which he does by developing his own, admittedly idiosyncratic, application oriented language. His current application is chip design. Again I ask you how would you have developed a chip? Chuck has now at least a half a dozen serious chip designs, all original, to his credit. All developed with tools of his own design. BobLQ -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-lpsg
