Questions for a Chuck Moore interview

["Michael A. Losh" <mlosh@xxxxxxx>]

Here is what I would ask Chuck:

CHIPS
---------
What are the challenges in putting DRAM or Static RAM on chip for fully
integrated MISC chips?  Are there too few layers to lay out the memory
cells effectively?

What are the challenges in getting 1 GHz MISC chips?  Are there
reasonable approaches to get there?  What feature size and voltages
would be realistic for 1 GHz?  Would there be problems with heat
dissipation and EM noise?

Is it practical to integrate multiple CPU cores in a single die, which
can communicate over a very high speed link, in other words, make
parallel processing clusters on a single chip?  

I have heard indirectly that you are concerned about some of the Quantum
Mechanical effects of very small circuits.  Have you considered or even
looked at some of the QM computing research?  Given your educational
background in physics, would you be interested in developing QM
computing circuits?  How about designing nano-scale mechanical or
electromechanical devices?

Do you have any comments about what Patriot Scientific is doing with the
ShBoom chip?

VOICE and INPUT DEVICES
----------
Concerning voice recognition, a while ago you were quoted as saying "I
fail to see that English is a good language to describe things to a
computer."  Recently, you said that voice recognition is area you may
look into later.  Do you have any ideas on how you would use voice
effectively as a comptuer-human interface?  Could a voice-based system
be suitable for programming?  What would such a programming session
sound like?

Have you seen the advertisement for the B.A.T. chord keyboard (keypad)? 
It has a key for each finger than three for the thumb.  Do you have any
other new ideas of keyboard input?

SOFTWARE and PROGRAMMING
--------------------
You have made some negative remarks about Microsoft Windows and other
operating systems.  Do you put up with them sometimes in order to do
practical things?  Do you use any word processing software for writing
(documentation, letters, proposals, other mundane tasks)?

Can you make any comments on Java?  Sun Microsystems is using Forth as
Open Boot firmware.  I wish they would have developed Java on the
foundation of Forth instead of C++.

You have described yourself as a "perfectionist" which is a useful
quality for a programmer, at least if you want to rewrite software to
make it as good as possible.  But the commercial world is going full
bore towards pre-built software components and reuse, promoting Visual
Basic and Java as glue languages for quickly slapping together systems. 
This leads to very inefficient use of computer resources, but it does
seem to save programmer time and allow mediocre programmers to put
together systems with a lot of functionality.  Is it worthwile to
justify the  Forth/rewrite-everything approach to the masses in this
age?

How is software different from manufactured items, where a certain
amount of standardization of parts has lead to much cheaper and better
performing products, such as automobiles?  Is Forth only appropriate for
the "craftsman" or "chef" programmers?

If someone asked you to develop something like a Graphical Word
Processor (WYSIWYG) for editing and printing formatted text, what would
be your overall approach?  Would you prefer to work with other
programmers or alone?  How big would your object code be?  Would your
answers change much for a graphical Web browser?

Your development approach seems to work well for small systems, but what
would you do if you had to develop or design an "enterprise solution"
for a major corporaion supporting very large databases?  As an example,
the system has 1000 users for data entry, approval, and mangement;
stores several dozen gigabytes of data in 100+ tables; "must"
generate/display 300 reports for the users; and must automate the flow
of work in well-defined business processes.  What hardware would you
recommend for the parts of the system?  What software?  Would you
recommend a fully custom development?  Do you think that current
commercial database management systems are good and justified or
overblown and bloated?  Do you think that the client/server
architechtures popular with business are appropriate?

If making a living where no concern at all, what would you work on or do
to occupy your time?  Would you consider writing a column again?
--
Mike Losh       mlosh@tir.com