The Beautiful Simplicity of ColorForth (2013)

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ashleyf/archive/2013/11/02/colorforth.aspx

by implmentor • 12 years ago

95 29 12 years ago

blogs.msdn.com

pella• 12 years ago

code: https://github.com/AshleyF/Color

blog series: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ashleyf/archive/tags/color/

kabdib4• 12 years ago

I'm red-green colorblind, and this amuses me.

(I have strong, negative opinions about FORTH, having seen at close-hand a few disasters that resulted from using the language, but I have to credit FORTH for being achingly spare and rather pretty).

pcmonk• 12 years ago

I'm deuteranomalous too, and I first thought, "I can distinguish these colors easily, I'm glad they chose colorblind-friendly colors". Then I read the color list and realized there were more colors than I thought.

alex4nder2• 12 years ago

To add 'color' to the comments: I've got strong positive opinions about forth, when used properly. I've helped save several embedded/early-stage board bring-up projects with it.

More than one person has called forth a programmer "amplifier". If C++ has the capacity to blow off your whole leg, forth is more than capable of forming a black hole beneath you and sucking you in.

kabdib4• 12 years ago

FORTH definitely seemed to be a kook amplifier. It tended to attract personalities who were unhinged and not very disciplined.

The episode that most sticks in my mind was when a cow-orker of mine at Atari tried to write a game in FORTH. He blew all his ROM space with runtime and framework and static bitmaps; game play was going to come later, as soon as he got his great FORTH-based game engine running. Ten months into a six month project, 20K into a 16K ROM and with frame times on the order of 5 FPS (utterly unplayable) he basically stopped giving his manager any status, and was fired. All this time, good performance, great game play and small code space were "just around the corner, like next week, maybe" because the magic of FORTH was going to save the day.

That was a near total failure of management, good engineering practice, scheduling and hiring, all at once.

At nearly the same time, a friend of mine was writing some great process-control stuff for another company, in FORTH. We had many conversations about the Atari programmer in question. My friend was pragmatic, conscious of his own faults, and probably the best FORTH programmer I've ever known.

"Not everyone can handle this stuff," he said.

A few years later I asked him if any of his FORTH code had survived when he left that company, and he smiled a little and asked me what I thought.

"They threw it all away, right?"

"Right."

I don't know how much that cost the company in question. Probably a lot.

In another case, there was a hardware bring-up engineer who wrote a bunch of tests and exercisers in FORTH. This was an initial win because he taught the hardware people FORTH, too, and they wrote a lot of their tests in it, and they were pretty productive. This was unarguably good stuff. But when it came to write native code drivers for the platform's OS we found all kinds of cycle-level timing issues that had been masked by FORTH's inner interpreter overhead, and I spent weeks chasing some of these, inserting magic NOP instructions to work around glitches.

So am I utterly negative about FORTH? No, it's a tool. I get really skeptical that you can ship a real product in it, though, and I think that FORTH's successes are in very specialized niches and not very visible.

Color FORTH made me laugh, though.

da02• 12 years ago

I've never used Forth. However, I am curious about those disasters you mentioned. Have you written about them anywhere?

brianobush• 12 years ago

You choose the colors you want to use, but in all reality you will likely never use this esoteric dev environment. As a side, I have seen numerous close-hand disasters in Java and C too. The problem is usually between the keyboard and chair.

boomlinde3• 12 years ago

I remember there was a quite intense discussion about ColorForth discriminating color blind users (HN or ./ would be the kind of place where this type of discussion exists, but I can't remember which).

... I also remember reading that C. Moore added the syntactically significant coloring to help with his own visual impairment.

e12e2• 12 years ago

What an interesting series. The start is:

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ashleyf/archive/2013/09/21/chuck-moo...

dang• 12 years ago

Which was discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6667592.

e12e2• 12 years ago

And for those (not quite) following along at home, there's a link in there (or in one of the other related links) to Moore's talk at Strange Loop 2013:

http://www.infoq.com/presentations/power-144-chip

Very interesting IMHO!

[edit: I'm delighted to see a little more of this chip, after being rather exited about it when it was first announced/launched (just not quite 450USD exited). There are some fascinating notes on Moore's (now dead?) eval blog[1], such as the notes on driving a VGA display:

http://www.colorforth.com/video.htm

[1] http://www.colorforth.com/haypress.htm

]

euccastro• 12 years ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6940552

The Beautiful Simplicity of ColorForth (2013)

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