Go Forth and multiply
After interviewing Dave Gauer of ratfactor.com for an upcoming episode for the pod, I was intrigued by what he'd said about a programming language called Forth. I'd heard of the language, but never actually looked into it.
Fortunately, last Friday, I spent about five hours getting tattooed. (Side note: it turns out that the back of the knee is a pretty painful area to get tattooed.) While I lay there, I decided it was a good time to read through Dave's excellent (but lengthy) article on his journey with Forth.
Forth: The programming language that writes itself: The Web Page
An exploration of the evolution and meaning of the Forth programming language and its context in history.
Dave walks through the history of the language, contextualizing its development and showing how its somewhat esoteric design isn't so much the product of academic research (despite there being academic research that resulted in similar languages). Instead it stem from Chuck Moore's pragmatism as he encountered new computers and challenges in his career.
The article left me feeling a bunch of different ways:
- It left me feeling completely lost about how you might actually write non-trivial programs in this strange language.
- It left me energized to try writing non-trivial programs in Forth.
- Finally, it left me curious as to whether I could write my own Forth.
There is, I learned, something very Forth-y about writing your own Forth, learning how it works under the hood, trying to make different decisions, and likely learning that there's a reason Chuck Moore made the decisions he did.
So far, I've only toyed with an implementation of ANS Forth called with Gforth (as it was available from Homebrew), but I'm definitely intrigued by this strange language.
Go checkout out Forth and multiply the number of implementations of it.—Genesis 1:28, paraphrased
The tech interview process is broken. I'm not sure I've ever met anyone who approves of the state of tech skill assessment. Most conversations on the topic end in the parties admitting that they don't know how to do better than what they are doing. Some folks do have ideas, but they don't often also have that equally important ingredient: the power to implement them.
On this week's episode of Dead Code, I chatted with Mond about the problem. No solution was found.
From my first listen, I knew I'd be recommending this album this week. Anfauglir's Akallabêth is a symphonic black metal concept album based on The Silmarillion and it delivers everything you could want from such a thing. Four tracks. Seventy two minutes. More than three thousand years of fantasy history.
Go listen on Bandcamp:
