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Language extensibility (was: Why is tcl broken?)

Christopher B. Browne cbbrowne at news.brownes.org
Thu Jul 1 23:33:03 EDT 1999 
On Thu,  1 Jul 1999 17:12:06 -0700 (PDT), Eugene Leitl <eugene.leitl at lrz.uni-muenchen.de> posted:
>Lars Marius Garshol writes:
> > 
> > Huh? Forth dates back to the 60s, whereas Scheme is from 1975, and I'm
> > quite unsure of whether Chuck Moore knew Lisp at all.
>
>Chuck is mostly doing (quirky, but fascinating) hardware design 
>nowadays. Check out http://www.ultratechnology.com/ to what he has
>been up to recently.

Anyone else that said the things Chuck Moore does would be considered
a "net-kook."  He's had some odd-ball stuff such as:
- Actually using a "chording" keyboard
- Eliminating source code (OK)
- A 20 bit microprocessor
- A conciously tail-recursive Forth
- Designing chips by directly manipulating arrays, rather than using
abstract languages.
- The claim that code should *not* be written to be reusable, but rather
should be tightened so as to "throw away everything that isn't being used."

If it weren't that he's actually gotten truly useful results out of
all of these things, he'd probably be considered "just another of the
opinionated fools" that clutter up the Internet.

Note that the final item on that list is really crucial; he minimizes
things to the max, and the rather bizarre results are indeed direct
results of that philosophy.
-- 
Those who do not understand Unix are condemned to reinvent it, poorly. 	
-- Henry Spencer          <http://www.hex.net/~cbbrowne/lsf.html>
cbbrowne at hex.net - "What have you contributed to free software today?..."
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