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Re: [colorforth] Hello - and where to begin?

Jeff Fox wrote:

Well if I do it it would be for neural and expert systems and
voice since those are my interests. Those are generally regarded
as high-end high-performance scientific research applications
although some people have built special purpose hardware.
I used to work for Floating Point Systems ... I'm intensely familiar with the battles between special-purpose and general-purpose hardware and why the economics are against special-purpose hardware. The window of opportunity for FPS in array processors and mini-supercompters was about 1974 -- 1990. Fifteen years or so, although I'd say only the first ten were really on the up side.
Now it's 15 + years later and massively parallel is back. This time I don't think the general-purpose people are going to take as long to catch up as they did last time. The parallel algorithms aren't any better now than they were then, the languages aren't any better now than they were then, etc. 


Right. Forth has a long history from early days in space to
the classic space probes to all the military stuff of
showing how to do things effectively with integer.
Yeah ... it *can* be done, but it's more work. I'm not sure they're even teaching it any more except in embedded shops where it's necessary. I learned all that stuff because I learned programming on one of the original Von Neumann machines, ILLIAC I. Guess what? Some people used a floating point interpreted order code on ILLIAC I. :) 


There has always been interest from high-end science
for the kind of parallelism SEAforth will offer.  Not
all scientific problems need to be expressed as gigantic
arrays of floating point numbers.
Yeah ... I remember lattice gas methods. And the Thinking Machines Connection Machine. And MASPAR. And the Massively Parallel Processor. People with low budgets used tricks and hacks like that, and people with big budgets used things that were easier to program. 



Yes, but historically interconnect was inefficient and
more expensive than processing.  The machines were
fabulously expensive.   Nothing with the performance
per watt or performance per $ has been done.  And
the E in SEAforth is Embedded where the whole thing
is about performance and power and $ costs.


The biggest bottleneck was programming and algorithms. I think it still is.


Chuck once said that if you set out to design a chip with the
intent of making it as difficult to program as possible you
might end up with Pentium.  I don't think that's true.  There
are things that are probably worse.  But clearly it is the
opposite of what Chuck likes.
Actually, the Pentium isn't all that difficult to program. The world champion of programming difficulty was probably the Multiflow VLIW architecture. It actually *couldn't* be programmed by humans -- only a compiler could do it. Yet another beautiful theory murdered by a gang of brutal facts. :) 


I think the people who were willing and able to pay $400 to buy
one and donate one demonstrate a different dynamic at work than
the sell in the existing consumer market forces that you have
highlighted.   But the degree to which intention, feeling,
and charitable contributions will eventually play in OLPC
is anyone's guess.

I am willing to put some energy into OLPC while I would
only be embarrased to opt out for the cheapest computing
toy laptop I could find given all else.  I am wishing
OLPC the best but am not going to get into a fight with
anyone about it.


[snip]


Yes.  I wonder if something like Pablo Reda's work with
children would be a good fit to a colorforth for OLPC project.
The OLPC project was really very firm on keeping the number of programming languages to a bare minimum, namely Python, Squeak Smalltalk and Open Firmware Forth. Of course with Mitch Bradley representing Forth and Alan Kay representing Smalltalk both senior members of the OLPC team, I wouldn't expect anything else. But if you have the "Linux port" of the Open Firmware Forth on the machine already, and can install gForth out of the Fedora repositories, is there a place for colorforth?
I'd like to try it, but then, I'd like to have an ELF executable colorforth I could run on my Athlon64 X2 under Linux 2.6.23. What are the chances of that happening? Is that something I could actually build myself? 

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