I miss fuzzy logic.

@clacke @tindall ... something something Kestrel Project something something ...

We desperately need something similar to the Open Compute Project but for personal computers (and with greater emphasis on libre licensing), not data center blades. I wanted the Kestrel Computer Project to be that project, but it fell through. I don't have the organizational skills needed to run it, and lack the connections/charisma to get others onboard. And, now, I'm too burnt out from it to resurrect it. This is somebody else's fight now.

@Canageek @SuricrasiaOnline This is why #forth programmers prefer not to use standard libraries for anything. We're one of the few programming language communities where "roll your own" has survived.

@atomicpoet I'm surprised you didn't mention the closest possible analog to your analogy: Google Video.

@Canageek @ajroach42 yes and no.

You had an entire domain specific language which was solely dedicated to user interface control layout, called "resources". This is probably what you're thinking of.

If you did the same thing in C, it would've taken a lot more code.

On the other hand, the resource editor/l layout language was very constrained in what you could accomplish. It always assumed a rigidly sized window or dialog box, and so you couldn't describe responsive layouts at all. So, making something that could respond to the user resizing the window still involved a decent amount of C code to back it up.

Unfortunately, I'm forced to use MS Teams to participate in my ADHD "training" sessions. That means running Teams on my Linux box. And all the bullshit that entails.

One of those bullshit things is that it says FUCK YOU ASSHOLE!!!! and just imposes its own auto-start shit, so that the next time you log in, it'll just start up and fuck you if you don't want it.

Well, there are a variety of ways of preventing MS Teams from forcing itself to auto-start whenever you log in, but most of them just don't work for me.

So, I did the only thing I know that would work unconditionally.

Now, whenever I run Teams, it unconditionally removes its autostart desktop file. Good fucking riddance.

@thegibson @kusuriya @Chuck_Half_Hazardly reminds me of a joke during one SVFIG meeting:

How much Forth could a Chuck Moore write if a Chuck Moore could write Forth?

I'm forced to reconsider the long-term viability of reverting to a stone-age society.

@niconiconi I honestly forgot about that. But, that's an outstanding thing to remember, especially if one is designing expansion ports!

@robby Libraries are usually superior to frameworks.

Corollary to above rules: Shared mutable state is premature optimization.

@calcifer are you sure all of the copyright notices are up to date? 😂

It burns me up when people conflate a dead project with a live one which has no further evolutionary pressures.

@veer66 I'm surprised that Common Lisp is as popular as it is.

@GeoffWozniak @uglyhack @yrabbit

Is that accurate?

Exactly! In order to make everything fit into the flash right now, we need to have all optimizations turned on. So, for example, a lot of the lines of code in the original source is reported by GDB as being optimized out, making it useless for interactive debugging purposes. A lot of lambda expressions are also optimized out, making it nearly impossible to fully debug without making changes to the source code. Etc.

@yrabbit Working with Rust would be OK if I had a target environment that fully supported a debug-mode build of the binary. But, since this is a small microcontroller with very limited flash, that is just not possible for our current environment.

I'd argue, based on this, that Rust is excellent for application development, or maybe large-scale kernel development. But, it's not ready for deep embedded work yet. It's just doesn't support debugging under such tight constraints.

@csepp @josias This depends heavily on which forth environment you're working with. I cannot give specifics. However with swift-X, you can compile and run individual words and interrogate and altar variables, and so forth, exactly as if it were a host compiled program. So even though you're working on the target, the user interface is exactly the same as if you were programming on the host.

@josias Yes. Very, very, very yes.

Nearly all Forth systems have source code which maps 1:1 with the produced object code. Even those systems which do not have exact 1:1 correspondance, the relationship between the generated assembly language and the original Forth code is usually obvious upon visual inspection.

In either case, Forth code is significantly easier to debug both interactively and in batch.

@wolf480pl If you use a normal debug build, that is indeed the case. However, because we are optimizing for size, a lot of size optimization takes place before generating the final assembly result. As a result, the resulting assembly language listing bears relatively little relationship to the original source code listing.

I'm quickly coming to the opinion that, if you're doing deep-embedded development in anything except assembly language (or some other language with assembly's level of abstraction), you're just doing it wrong. Full fucking stop.

Sigh.

Two weeks and counting debugging this fucking live-lock bug with this UART, and Rust's utter inability to cooperate with me when debugging is just straight up infuriating.

@jk OMG. You've done it! You've found the holy grail --- the anti-particle of the Rockstar Programmer. Behold, the Control Rod Programmer! 😀

@juliobiason I've been saying this for decades now. Djikstra was straight-up wrong on this one.

While I'm not a professional educator, I have given talks about best practices for programming over my career, and I've found that teaching people low-level programming first (for example, assembly language) and letting them experience the pain of trying to scale that process up gives the right foundation and motivation to introduce higher-level languages and, more importantly, the concepts that they introduced at the time.

I'm a big proponent of this. If you go the opposite direction, you get ... waves hand around current software landscape this.