From: ForthNet@willett.pgh.pa.us (ForthNet articles from GEnie)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.forth
Subject: PHILOSOPHY & CM
Date: 24 Jan 93 13:45:21 GMT
Organization: EIEI-U

Category 1,  Topic 12
Message 12        Sat Jan 23, 1993
L.ZETTEL [Len]               at 19:44 EST
 
  Chuck Moore, the creator of Forth, is the special guest in conference
  on the GEnie Forth RoundTable for 24 August 1989. The topic of Chuck's
  conference is 'The future of Forth...' . 

 Computers are getting ever more complicated, in violation of the
  first principle of human activity: KEEP IT SIMPLE .

  1- I like classic Forth.
  2- This includes BLOCKs - simpler, faster, better than files.
  11- A program that can do everything (ie, SPICE) can do nothing
      well, fast, easily.

 Doc.no.: X3J14/89-002
          Draft, Feb. 10, 1989

 The facts speak for themselves.  That's my gut reaction.

 "Input stream."  I think this is obsolete.  Memories are getting 
 large--you don't need to fragment source into blocks. 

 Consequences have a habit of multiplying.

 From CLMFORTH.ARC

 Computer languages are tools only.  It is the value of what 
 they produce that establishes their fitness in the world
 (this is true of human language in general).

 From MOORE87.SEP

     Moore uses tracks which are 5 blocks at a time.  Blocks 
 should continue.  He'd give users a choice of the length of 
 a block ( 1k, 5k, whatever ) but wouldn't want to give them 
 variable length since limits performance and causes more 
 overhead than necessary.  

  His philosophy is to use the least amount of hardware.

 TRANSCRIPT OF CSI FORTH FORUM CONFERENCE 
 WITH CHARLES MOORE -- 1/16/86 (Moderated by Don Colburn, CSI)

 Files, I/O are horribly hardware dependent. Blocks are universal. 

 (Chuck) The wheel has been re-invented many times. It
 will be. To keep it simple, the overhead must be brutally
 pruned. I do this constantly, and I regret the inefficiency.

 Actually I'm not a purist.  Use what works. I do equate 
 simplicity with minimum character count.

 (Chuck) Confusion exists once, upon learing. Cost exists forever.

 (Michael Brady) Speaking of code - are you still writing
 one to two line words?

 (Chuck) More than ever. The factoring of an application
 leads to the development of a language. The language is
 more important than the application and rarely receives
 the appreciation it deserves. A concept that cannot be
 expressed tersely is a badly understood concept.

 Following appeared in the Proceedings of the 1983 Rochester Forth
 Conference.

 FORTH solves the software problem. It does so by addressing the
 real problem. FORTH is the language for man-machine
 communication. It allows you to isolate a concept, assign a label
 to it, and convey its meaning to a computer. It allows you to use
 this concept to teach more elaborate ones. It allows you to
 establish a context and maintain it through layers of complexity.
 These are precisely the characteristics of human languages. They
 must be the characteristics of computer languages.

 If we hope to continue to work in FORTH, we must assure that our 
 programs use its power and exhibit its virtues. They must be 
 compact, efficient and readable.

 Virtue does not lie in minimizing assembly code (thus maximizing
 portability) but in maximizing performance.

 From SIGFORTh Neswletter Vol1 #2, p9:

 The harsh fact is that few people know what to do with a computer.  They 
 decide that running an operating system is a substitute for productive work.
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