Best of GEnie..... March 1989 News from the GEnie Forth RoundTable by Gary Smith One of the 'Best of GEnie' columns to garner the most interest appeared in the September/October 1988 (Volume X,Number 3) issue of 'Forth Dimensions'. I think this is more than understandable, since that column featured the Real Time Conferences on the GEnie Forth RoundTable. We ARE interested in the thoughts and philosophies of our fellow Forthers. To recap briefly that column: I discussed Leonard Morgenstern's excellent Sunday night FIGGY BAR which addresses fundamental Forth coding issues. I must repeat, Leonard's knowledge and style make this a most pleasant opportunity to expand on your ability to write Forth code. Thursday night is the regular FIGGY BAR where I attempt to maintain some sense of order amidst mayhem. No rule is the rule here as long as topics pertain to Forth. Some wonderful discussions result despite the din. One which quickly comes to find centered on VMS (Virtual Mass Storage) for F-PC (Zimmer and associates excellent F-83 for PC's). The exchanges were wonderful. The stars of the Real Time Conferences are our special guests. Guests and their topics since that September/October 'Forth Dimensions' include Mitch Bradley ("Forth in a Unix environment", August 1988), Larry Forsley ("Forth and the Future", October 1988), Dr. C.H.Ting ("Forth and Zen", October 1988), and Larry Forsley ("Forth in Publications", December 1988). I will conclude this conference series in the next issue with conferences featuring George Shaw, Mike Perry, Randy Dumse and Wil Baden. It should be clear, if you are not participating in these conferences you are missing out on a lot of Forth knowledge and insight. As before, I will feature the guests' opening remarks for their respective conferences. Mitch Bradley Staff Engineer with Sun Microsystems and Owner of Bradley Forthware August 1988 <[Mitch] PRESS16> Sun Microsystems: Leading supplier of technical workstations, has grown to $1 billion annual sales in 6 years. I've been there since 1982 (employee #50, now over 7500 employees). Bradley Forthware: My home company. Supplies Forth for 680x0 machines (Atari ST, Macintosh, Sun, others) and SPARC machines (Sun, single board). Past Use of Forth at Sun: - "Unofficial" bringup standalone diagnostics. - A small number of Unix-based tools. Current Forth work at Sun: - Developing new Forth-based firmware for Suns; will probably become the standard firmware shipped with Suns sometime in the future. - Forth is used as an interactive monitor and as a CPU-independent language for "plug-in" boot drivers (not Unix drivers; they're still written in C) My (perhaps) controversial beliefs: - Forth needs to "grow up". - The "minimalist" Forth philosophy is responsible for Forth's relative lack of success. - Screens suck. - Forth's portability problems are due to disregard of reality. - C has its advantages - Forth chips are no big deal. Larry Forsley Director of the Institute for Applied Forth Research October 1988 <[larry] PRESS9> Forth and the Future. First, what is the future of computing ? Procedural languges, non-procedural languages, expert systems, neural networks, artifical intelligence? Perhaps where we're heading for is augmented intelligence where the computer is an amplifier. Ah, convergence between Forth and the Future. Chuck Moore speaks of Forth as an amplilifier for good and bad programmers and applications alike. What is Forth ? Who is Forth for ? What does Forth do best ? What do we want to do with it ? and a paradox... Forth is like the Tao. It is a way which is realized when followed. Its fragility is its strength. Its simplicity is its direction. Given all this I propose some trends I've observed and wish discussion upon. Unlike UNIX/C, Forth hasn't hit well with academia without students growing up to be employed like their parents. We lack Reagonomics as an economic engine. Without that engine, the military doesn't want us eilther. If the military doesn't want us, we're not real; or unlike well fed physicists, and more like hungry biologists. This community has kept its minds clean, but hasn't yet had opportunity. Dr. C. H. Ting Software Engineer with Maxtor October 27,1988 <[ting] PRESS17> Thank you, Gary. Let me start by quoting Dr. Lin Yu-Tang, a famous Chinese modern writer, "A man's speech should be like girls' skirts. None preferred. If have to, the shorter the better. <[Gary] GARY-S> read the file PREZEN2.TXT are requested to do so to receive full benefit of Dr. Ting's topic intent. The notes follow: Welcome to this Zen and Forth Conference. What I like to focus on tonight is the religious aspect of Forth. Zen is the religious development in China which had many similary charisteristics with Forth. I would like to use it to open up our discussions. Zen stresses simplicity. Enlightment is not as complicated as traditional Budhism lead you to believe. It is not in the documentation. It is not in the established practices. It is in yourself. You have it already. But you have to discover it yourself. It is also an expierence, which can only be passed from mouth to mouth, and from heart to heart, not by books or written words. It became an oral tradition. Forth is the Zen of computing. Background of Zen in China The background of Zen was hundreds of years of Budhism spread into China from India. Tons or literatures were translated, most of them were badly translated that only the priesthood could make sense out of them. Lots of temples and monasteries were established. Millions were lead to believe that they could attain enlightment and a better second life by certain practices and rituals. The Zen masters found that the best way to attain enlightment was not through study of literature, not through established rituals, but by ridding off foreign things in oneself. Meditation, hard physical labor, occasional loud noise, and sometimes a sharp blow on the head would precipitate the enlightment. Zen became very successful in China and Japan because it basically integrated the essense of Budhism and Toaism. Much of the more foreign Hinduism influences were diluted so that it grew more naturally in the Chinese environment. It became the principal philosophy in Far East dealing with meaning of life and provided a framework that individuals could find happiness and satisfaction in life. Similarities between Zen and Forth * They presented their subjects in the simplest ways, stripping away all the irrelevant elements preventing understanding of the essense of the subjects. Simplicity is the most common trait. * They had to break away from massive establishments overloaded with church, documentation, practices, and unfortunated, money. * Enlightment is not derived from established church, documentation, practices, or money. * Enlightment does require personal effort. When personal effort reaches a critical mass, enlightment usually comes in a flash. * They both started as oral traditions. Documentations were considered untrustworthy, dangerous, and superfluous. * They attracted feverish, and loyal followers, as well as oppositions of similar intensity. * They became fragmented as individuals perceived their own brands of truth. Standards committees were organized to iron out differences, but never quite succeeded. Religious Experience in Forth Programmers The most intense form of religious experience is enlightment in Zen and Budhism, re-birth of a Christian, commitment to a marriage, etc. Most Forth programmer had very similar experience, which convinced them the righteousness of Forth. It generally happens after the completion of a substantial project, the full understanding of INTERPRET, figuring out what DOES> does, or when he sees 'ok' from the system he's building. Prior to it, he generally has had spent a couple of months trying figure out why Forth works or why his Forth does not work. Casual Forth users, like taking a course in Forth, generally do not have the intense study and exploring period to warrant the enlightment. Most of them drift away at the next wind. Let's open up the floor and see how many people share similar experience. I am particularly interested in at which stage you attained enlightment, if you do. The next question is: Is this experience transferable to other people? Is this Forth desease contageous? It seemed that Forth was contagious in '77-'80 period due to the explosive growth of FIG. It also seems that it is not contagious now. Anybody care to comment? Why Forth is Right? Why Forth is right, and why all other computer languages are wrong? It is because Forth is the essense of computing. Then what is computing? Man created this machine, somewhat in his own image, logically. He tried, but not quite succeeded. Because he is too complicated to be cloned by mechanical or electronic media. He wanted this machine, he called it computer, to do something useful; that is, things he would have to do himself otherwise. They include doing lots of additions, multiplications, logic operations, piloting an airplane, or guiding a missile. Because the machine is of lesser 'intelligence', it must be given precise, unanbiguous instructions. The essense of computing is to give this machine precise, unabiguous instructions. Why Forth is right? Because it is the best vehicle to construct and to deliver to this machine precise, unambiguous instructions. Forth consists of a set of instructions, we call words, which Man can use to make the Machine to do what he desired of the Machine within the capability of the Machine. This is true for all other languages. But Forth delivers the instructions directly to the machine (it interprets), and new instructions can be constructed freely from existing instructions (it compiles). In Forth, Man is not programming the Machine. He is designing a new Machine by adding new instructions to it, so that the Machine becomes a closer clone to his image. Forth is right because it allows the Machine to grow to be like its master. The Forth syntax is simple because the Machine understands it best, and it is not difficult for the Man to learn and use it. The Man gets the best satisfaction if he means what he says, because the Machine does exactly what he says. Simple syntax does not means weak syntax. As Forth syntax fully supports the classical control structures and modularity touted by the proponents of modern structured porogramming. I like Bach's music, but I cannot play. So I programmed my computer to play his music for me. To program it became very tedious, because I had to enter every note to build a whole piece. I gave my computer a scanner so it scans the music and converts the score to notes that it can then play for me. The computer reads the music, very similar to the way I read the music. It writes out the notes to a file, just like what I would have written them. I cloned a part of myself in my computer. You can do it in any language, but Forth let me do it in the shortest time. The computer grows steadily, like a child, but only one word at a time. Larry Forsley Owner of DashFind Associates.. and Publisher of the Journal of Forth Applications and Research. December 1988 <[larry] PRESS14> Thank you. Forth is going on towards 20 years. For the first several, it was totally an oral tradition. Forth, Inc. published some early manuals. Two papers appeared in the IEEE and Astronomy literature, and all was silence until Forth Dimensions, FORML Conferences, the Journal of Forth Application and Research, Rochester Conference Proceedings. Then Dr. Dobbs and the big one... Byte Magazine, 1980 and their first language issue, which happened to be on Forth. As of two years ago, when last I counted, there were about 2,000 references to Forth in the literature. But are we writing what we're doing more than before? Are we writing to ourselves or to a larger group? Early on, Elizabeth Rather worried that the Journal would take good authors away from the 'open' literature. Did that happen? Who reads about Forth in Dobbs? And, what about textbooks. Even with Brodie, Winfield, Haydon, Kelly and Spies, Pountain why isn't there a suitable college level text that ties Forth into the rest of computing? <[Gary] GARY-S> Larry - I know you were approached on this. Will you please for once and for all respond to the non-performance of JFAR this year. Where is it? What are your plans to make good on purchased volumes, and when ? <[larry] PRESS14> Thanks for the chance to respond. JFAR V 2 will be going to the printers in about 2 weeks. Just before Christmas. It has papers by Dress (neural nets), Grossman (a solver for f(x)=0), Noble (on the death of Fortran), Roye (exception handling), Feucht (LISP and a new number system), and a bit more. We have been held up converting to an electronic system. We now use Ventura Publisher and have found the transition very painful. JFAR V 3 and V 4 papers are now being processed. I expect volume V to be finished by June 89.