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This is a tech site. It's spelled Forth.

I'm sure you could find a version of http://www.forth.org/ to work on this machine. I recently (re)discovered this nice little language/environment and one of my summer projects is to learn more... Forth traditionally lives on a floppy, merging code and data in a way similar to Smalltalk images.

It's an efficient language, and pretty fast -- sometimes faster than C. It's essentially a "different" way to write structured assembly from what C is...

You might even be able to port openfirmware to you platform, and, with a bit of work, run forth directly from BIOS!

As others have suggested, being able to load code from the serial or parallel port might be the way to go... or you might be able to get an old harddrive to work?

See also: http://www.classiccmp.org/dunfield/img/index.htm

Good luck!

You want to know the latest trends for Java-based web development? Fewer and fewer people are going to be doing Java-based web development in the future.

Fuck trends. They're wrong. Every day the industry continues to stay with its current ridiculous technologies when vastly superior ones were invented decades ago infuriates me further. If it doesn't infuriate you, you're not paying close enough attention.

My advice: read Lambda the Ultimate and Steve Yegge's blog. Endeavor to learn what the lambda calculus and referential transparency are. If you are sincerely interested in bettering yourself as a programmer and don't go find out who Alonzo Church was then so help me God I will kick you in the balls. Learn about SML and type inference. Learn about Haskell and monads. Learn about process calculi and Erlang. Learn about Lisp and code generation and domain-specific languages. Learn about Scheme and lexical closures and continuations. Learn about Smalltalk and what OO was really supposed to be. Learn about type theory and formalism and the Curry-Howard correspondence. Learn about Forth and Joy and how you can have a powerful, expressive language without even so much as a grammar. Learn about Intercal and Befunge and just how badly your choice of programming language can torture you. Learn about UML and Ruby on Rails and Seaside and agile programming and Java generics and Python generators. Learn about aspect-oriented programming, context-oriented programming and concept programming. Learn about multi-paradigm languages like OCaml or Oz. Learn about weird Lisp dialects with syntax like Rebol or Dylan.

Realize that library design is language design. Realize that asynchronous programming with callbacks and explicit state in a world where lightweight coroutines were around in the days of fucking Simula in the 60s for Christ's sake is cruel and unusual torture. (Sorry, pet programming construct.) Realize that the programming language research community, while considering systems programming a solved problem and generally not interested in talking about human factors, is doing some genuinely promising work. Did you know that there are conc

Is this the of which you speak?

Programmed in FIG Forth?

"Heading 3 from the article: Programs as Data. Yep, lisp was doing that decades ago :P"

And Forth was Data as code.

It sounds like we all are pining for the "Good , old, days".

When men were men, and our development environments respected that. None of these 'sissified' "Can I wipe your chin?" we presently have. :)

Ever heard of FORTH?

Geez, it's only been around since 1970...

And LISP has been around since the 1950s...

FORTH is trivial to implement (in a few hundred lines rather than a few thousand) and can be compiled or interpreted. It is interactive, the parser is completely minimal (all tokens are seperated by spaces with few exceptions) and the compiler/interpreter/system can be extremely compact. The code also runs relatively quickly. FORTH was fairly popular in the days of 8-bit micros and 16-bit minis for these reasons, and is still used in microcontrollers and workstation firmware.

Can I get any advice? Is Ruby really "more powerful than Perl and more object oriented than Python" - is this what I'm looking for, or should I put it off and learn Python first?

No, it is not more powerful than Perl. But than again, nothing is. The points is not what is more powerful per se, but rather which is more powerful in your hands and which one best fits your own brain. At this point it is extremely important to mention Parrot: "The amazing project [...] to really unite Perl and Python one day (not to mention Tcl, Scheme, Forth and Ruby, to name just a few)."

Perl, Python and Ruby, while not the only ones, are certainly the most important languages for the Parrot development. Parrot will not be considered ready until all of them are fully supported, and at this point Parrot will be their main target Virtual Machine, running each of them and allowing them to interoperate. At this point it won't matter which of those languages you personally use, because whatever you choose you will still have access to all of the libraries and module, class and object, of each of them.

Few years ago I will tell you: "go for Perl because of CPAN." Now my advice woule be: "go for whatever you please, for in few years it won't really matter. We will be able to work on the same project, write the same application. I will write my part in Perl 6, you will write yours in Ruby, someone will write in Python and another one in Scheme. We will all subclass our classes, invoke our methods, use our objects, and we will produce a single, monolithic Parrot application anyway."

Just imagine picking up some fresh, young and cutting-edge language designed weeks ago--or even designing your own language--and having every module from CPAN available at once, working just fine using your new language syntax. This is the future Perl, Python and Ruby. Interoperation instead of competition.

Wait...

There's a Forth Service pack for 2.6?

Sweet!

It's interesting because Open Firmware is based around a FORTH interpreter, using which high-level BIOS code is implemented. This code is portable across different binary architectures. This has interesting implications for the initialisation of peripherals. It also means you can program your own BIOS at a command line at system start up.

There are loads of other uses, and it's already an establishged Open standard, and has been in use for well over a decade.

Goodness me! I have on my bookshelf a book by Glyn Emery called The Students' FORTH. I bought it in 1988 when I was 14 from Waterstones in Aberdeen. It still has the price on it. It's a good book. Not many people have heard of FORTH nowadays, but it has its place.

we started seeing more people die of other conditions -- generally attributed to "old age", but most likely heart attacks, strokes, pneumonia, and so forth.

What? forth? Oh, my God! I will stop right now! Thanks.

Anyway, what does anyone care? This is Slashdot, and the facts are irrelevant.

And why do I post at 0 when my karma is "excellent?"

32K is only for compiled apps. No scripting available at such level.

Remember that for embedded stuff, you want low power consumption. And for that, you'll have a relatively slow (by modern desktop PC standards) CPU. A JRE will use a stupid amount of CPU horsepower just to run, so your actual embedded system will run like a bag of shit. Can you imagine if the ABS controller in your car used Java?

Learn C. It's pretty similar to Java, but is far more suitable for writing embedded controller software. Remember that you are going to be controlling things, not drawing widgets on a screen, so an OO language is not really necessary (or even desirable). Instead, you will be reading and writing IO ports, which will involve a certain amount of bare metal programming. Java won't really let you do this. You could use FORTH, which was invented for writing controller software for steerable telescopes.

Of course, if you must use Java, you could always compile to machine code instead of byte code. It's still not particularly great for embedded stuff, though.

However, there are several (at least 8 plus 3 MIA) Forth operating systems afoot. Including one which is implemented as a Linux kernel thread.

Do they still use Forth (FIG) to process data from these things?

Arthur T. Murray has apparently become the first person to build a system that demonstrates true artificial intelligence (A.I.). It is expected that his Mentifex system developed in Forth and JavaScript will soon pass the Turing Test, and will shortly thereafter enslave the entire human race.

unless it's coded in Forth.

Forget C/C++/Assembler/Java/VB... let's do it all in Forth No, seriously... your computer already uses it to boot anyways.

It's the perfect middle ground between C and Assembly. Check it out.

I am continually dismayed.

your keyboard is there to service your programming language, not the other way around. you're obviously not an APL programmers.

where have all the real programmers gone?

or even the ones who know my favourite programming language...

object-oriented, bah.

Tape reels for wheels and darlingtons for power (one amp at 5V per coil, up to two coils active per motor at a time).

Motors bolted together back to back with shorter bolts at top and longer bolts at bottom, so axles are slanted and center of gravity is below center of wheels (and thus balances on two wheels, tho it rocks back and forth a bit when it starts or stops).

Programmed (in Forth of course) to do a series of military maneuver farces.

Had to build my own parallel port when I first built it, but a PC-clone port works fine. (Original machine was a Sanyo Z80 CP/M box with ribbon cable for a bus: I stuck a Z80-PIO on it).

The thing was so goofy/hilarious I entered it into the annual student art show/contest and had it on display for a couple weeks. I used to love to sit in the lounge and see people come around the corner and confront it. They would walk in when it was pausing between performances and jump two feet in the air a couple of minutes later when it started to wave its flag like a maniac, turn in place, and do zig zags. Poor art-lovers didn't know what to think.

Spelling: The spelling is correct.

Amazing that Forth might still be good for something. I didn't think they made memories that small anymore. I mean 8K bytes is about what Western Electric was limiting the Viewtron videotex terminal to in 1981 when I tried to get it's ROM burned with Forth so we could dynamically download graphics macros. Efficient use of RAM as well as 1200bps modem bandwidth. (This is, in fact, what gave rise to Postscript subsequent to our visit to Xerox PARC.)

Try it, it's fun!

Remember, you can't spell "Forth" with a "u".
--

Forth .org's website

Bigforth (Has its own GUI)

As anyone can obviously see, the old paradigms have failed. Make way for the future, make way for PISC!

That's right, the wave of the future is the Pathetic Instruction Set Computer.

(in all seriousness, if this stuff turns your crank, building a computer from standard TTLs is way cool)