Top all-time · #1126
C
Charles Moore
Personal blog · ultratechnology.comprogramminghardware
Charles Moore's personal blog at ultratechnology.com covers programming and hardware. Since 2008, 64 different Hacker News readers have linked it 116 times, most often “1x Forth (1999)”. No feed was found, so read it on the site itself.
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116mentions?
64HN people?
2008–2026first – last linked?
Most-linked posts?
- 1x Forth (1999)8 people · 13 mentions · first linked 2012-10-07
- Levels of code in Forth programming (2002)6 people · 8 mentions · first linked 2011-05-22
- Thoughtful programming and Forth6 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2009-02-17
- OKAD (Oh CAD)6 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2012-01-23
- Chuck Moore's Comments on Forth [1993]5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2011-05-21
- Forth Methodology Applied to Programming (2001)5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2008-11-06
- Low Fat Computing5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2012-02-13
- /chips.htm5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2009-12-26
- 1x Forth (1999)4 people · 9 mentions · first linked 2024-01-27
- Introduction to Thoughtful Programming and the Forth Philosophy3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2011-12-22
What Hacker News says?
Reminds me of https://www.ultratechnology.com/1xforth.htm Arguing against 10x complexity & abstractions, with 1x coding :-)
Comment linking /1xforth.htm
on “We are destroying software”Submitted Levels of code in Forth programming (2002) as a story · 163 points
HN discussionHave you looked in the STEPS program by Alan Kay? Trying to recreate modern computing setup from the OS up in 20k lines of code... http://www.vpri.org/pdf/tr2012001_steps.pdf "If computing is important -- for daily life, learning, business, national defense, jobs, and more -- then qualitatively advancing computing is extremely important. Fro example, many software systems today are made from millions to hundreds of…
Comment linking /forth.htm
on “Ask HN: Are we overcomplicating software development?”Submitted Plan9 from? as a story · 100 points
HN discussionYes, abstraction and generalization are properties you'd rather look for the second time around . Someone was already warning about this 25 years ago [1]: You have a boring problem and hiding behind it is a much more interesting problem. So you code the more interesting problem and the one you've got is a subset of it and it falls out trivial. But of course you wrote ten times as much code as you needed to solve the…
Comment linking /1xforth.htm
on “That's not an abstraction, that's a layer of indirection”Submitted The Forth Methodology of Charles Moore (2001) as a story · 93 points
HN discussionThe whole personal computing ecosystem as it stands today seems like a huge failure of imagination. http://www.ultratechnology.com/scope.htm
Comment linking /scope.htm
on “AdBlock Plus’s effect on Firefox’s memory usage”Submitted 1x Forth (1999) as a story · 67 points
HN discussion"I'm sure you know perfecly well that you are talking nonsense, as does anybody else who's reading this thread" How do you expect me to answer something like that? You don't know the language and are intent on having an argument with me about this? When Forth is used correctly productivity gains become exponential (the limit being application dependent). So, yes, when used correctly you can go 10, 100 and even 1,000…
Comment linking /forth.htm
on “How I coded in 1985”Submitted 1x Forth by Charles Moore (1999) as a story · 63 points
HN discussionI thought I originally heard about the 10x programmer thing from some of Chuck Moore's talks on Forth. So I went to re-find this article. But as it turns out he was arguing against 10x complexity and advocating avoiding abstractions with "1x" coding. http://www.ultratechnology.com/1xforth.htm
Comment linking /1xforth.htm
on “Ask HN: What are weird and/or novel ways to do web UIs?”Submitted F21 in a Mouse as a story · 25 points
HN discussionIs it a coincidence that both of you almost quoted C. Moore? "There seems to be a propensity to make things complicated. People love to make them complicated. You can see that in television programming you can see it in products in the marketplace, you can see it in internet web sites. Simply presenting the information is not enough, you have got to make it engaging. I think there is perhaps an optimal level of comp…
Comment linking /1xforth.htm
on “Programmers are not different, they need simple UIs”Submitted MuP21 – A High Performance MISC Processor (1995) as a story · 20 points
HN discussionOn the opposite side of the spectrum, there's Chuck Moore (Forth creator) who in trying to find the simplest combination of software and hardware for his projects devoted a lot of time into a DIY VLSI CAD system. Fascinating history behind it, although the actual OKAD system is essentially trade secret for his company. His site has been down for a while, but someone thankfully mirrored most of the pages here: https:…
Comment linking /okad.htm
on “Darpa invests $100M in a silicon compiler”Submitted Levels of code in Forth programming (2002) as a story · 9 points
HN discussionI don't know about the "stuff Haskell people get excited about", but IMHO, Haskell is a mathematician's language and the language of mathematics isn't a natural language. Dijkstra himself was also a mathematician, and his positions regarding programming languages features like 1-based indexing [1] are already conflicting with practice, the famous case being Lua which receives mixed opinions about it. I find for inst…
Comment linking /1xforth.htm
on “The foolishness of "natural language programming" (1978)”Submitted Thoughtful programming and Forth as a story · 6 points
HN discussionThere is the well-worn Pascal quote about having no time to write a shorter letter[1]. There is also, I think, an important point hidden in the “domain knowledge” part: the freedom to change the spec ; the effusive texts on Charles Moore’s approach to Forth programming[2,3], however much scepticism they deserve otherwise, are very direct about that freedom being essential. But that means simplicity is a cross-cuttin…
Comment linking /forth.htm
on “The collapse of complex software”Submitted 1x Forth (1999) as a story · 5 points
HN discussionA lot of languages(including forth) maps really poorly to LC. Read some of the Forth writing on portability at all costs: http://www.ultratechnology.com/antiansi.htm
Comment linking /antiansi.htm
on “Forth: The programming language that writes itself”Submitted Chuck Moore's Comments on Forth [1993] as a story · 5 points
HN discussionQuote from ( http://www.ultratechnology.com/1xforth.htm ): “ I wish I knew what to tell you that would lead you to write good Forth. I can demonstrate. I have demonstrated in the past, ad nauseam, applications where I can reduce the amount of code by 90% percent and in some cases 99%. It can be done, but in a case by case basis. The general principle still eludes me. ”
Comment linking /1xforth.htm
on “Chuck Moore, Extreme Programmer”Submitted 1x Forth by Charles Moore 4/13/99 as a story · 4 points
HN discussionI'm surprised that no one has mentioned https://flashforth.com/ There is no intriguing backstory for it, like for CollapseOS, but it's a ~6 kiloword, practical 4th environment for Microchip PIC microcontrollers, which are a lot simpler than Z80, btw... The source code is trivial to understand too. My father is still using it daily to replace/substitute Caterpillar machine electronics or build custom instruments for…
Comment linking /lowfat.htm
on “Collapse OS – Why Forth?”Submitted EForth and Zen as a story · 3 points
HN discussionI wonder if Ryan Dahl is following in Chuck Moore's footsteps now. http://www.ultratechnology.com/forth.htm
Comment linking /forth.htm
on “The Future of Programming in Node.js”Submitted Forth Methodology Applied to Programming (2001) as a story · 3 points
HN discussionOh yeah, you could whip a sweet little Forth system up for this processor. The first thing to do is to write a DCPU-16 assembler in Forth, and use that to write the primitives. That's pretty simple -- just look at the 6502 assembler: http://www.forth.org/fd/FD-V03N5.pdf Some Forth systems have metacompilers so they can retarget themselves to different architectures. http://www.ultratechnology.com/meta.html Using a m…
Comment linking /meta.html
on “Notch's Specification for the In-Game DCPU-16”Submitted Minimal Instruction Set Computers as a story · 2 points
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