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Comment by javascriptlol | Hacker News Reader

Thanks for the link. I will check this out later.

>Can you imagine not having Unix-like systems, and not being able to use C and all the languages built around that ecosystem?

Yes! Charles Moore has been essentially living this since the 1970's. No many have his level of courage though.

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You mean this one? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_H._Moore

Can you give some more detail? What does he use?

Towards the bottom of that page it mentions color forth. That is what he uses. It is a forth like language that removed punctuation and replaces it with colors.

Ah, upon further reading, colorForth has its own operating system, so he probably uses that too. I had seen the forth bits, but the GP implied he was using some non-Unix OS, and I was still curious about that.

Forth is conventionally a compiler, REPL, editor and OS all in one package. If I recall correctly, the reference implementation of ColorForth happens to run as a Windows application, but it pretty much lives in its own memory image and could probably be made bootable.

Sorry I wasn't clearer about that. Much like there were Lisp machines in the 80s Mr. Moore ran(perhaps still runs) a company that does custom Forth machines. So he uses his own hardware and his own software, turtles all the way down so to speak.

> Yes! Charles Moore has been essentially living this since the 1970's. No many have his level of courage though.

I'm an unbounded admirer of Charles Moore. But courageous? He's a software solipsist. His approach is certainly bold but I doubt he sees himself as courageous.

Call it bold or courageous. He's doing something few are willing to do. I'm not saying he's a hero in the same sense as a soldier or anything here, but he's worth 100x more than the drones who just keep piling mess upon mess without even being able to admit what they are doing.

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