cblum

Awesome!

Oh, interesting. I feel like I've gotten used to reasoning with rot and -rot. Didn't know there was advice out there not to use it.

Yep, annotating the examples with stack effects is in my plans :)

Author here! This was a super fun project that consumed over a month of evenings and weekends. In the past couple of days I finished the examples, and I'm glad to finally put it out there.

I don't quite remember how I fell into the Forth rabbit hole, but I think I first heard about Collapse OS. Then I read yosefk's "My history with Forth & stack machines" [0], which is actually very critical of Forth. But when I saw if/then/else being defined in Forth itself, I was hooked.

I've always been fascinated by the idea of having a minimal kernel of primitives from which "everything" can be built. Before Forth, I had only seen that in the form of Lisp's "Maxwell equations of software", which is cool, but always left me a little disappointed because it is too abstract to build something that you can actually interact with - you can't break out of its esoteric nature. The same applies to brainf*ck and other extremely small environments.

With Forth, however, you can start from almost nothing, and start adding things like ifs, loops, strings, etc., things that look more like your day-to-day programming. I find that there's a lot of beauty in that.

Anyways, I hope the examples in the repository do not look too awful to experienced Forth programmers :D

[0] https://yosefk.com/blog/my-history-with-forth-stack-machines...

> I’ve always described it as “the design team justifying their own existence after the job is done.”

I actually think that's really what is going on. Wish I had first hand evidence though.

I do know of a tangential phenomenon at a friend's work place. Her org has a dedicated build tools team. So every 6 months every project's build infrastructure needs to change to something entirely new, because the build tools team keeps having to justify its existence.

I don't know why a company would let this sort of thing happen. It's a massive waste of time for every team.

I keep telling people that and feel like a lone voice in the wilderness.

I looked at the city where I used to live in Brazil and most of it is red. It doesn't make sense. It's a pretty normal city not unlike a first world one. I'm not sure what they're really measuring there.

The consensus seems to be that you should wear a mask not to protect yourself from the virus, but to prevent spread in case you're carrying it and have no symptoms. If everyone wears a mask, contagion is dramatically reduced.

It's less common but it happens. My dad was diagnosed in his thirties. I remember him going from being slightly overweight to essentially a skeleton in just a few months.

> The Dragon spacecraft also runs Linux with flight software written in C++. The ship's touchscreen interface is rendered using Chromium and JavaScript.

I'm actually shocked by this statement. I would never trust JavaScript on a spacecraft.

You're describing a good experience. Try calling a restaurant where they barely speak any English. Or one that's busy and you and the other person can't hear each other over the loud noise.

That's great to know. Whenever I tell people my problem with mushrooms is that I can't stand the texture, they look at me like I'm a total weirdo.

The author's point seems to be that it's hard to figure out where and what to learn. They're not complaining they have to learn new things.

While this approach seems to work for a lot of people, personally I'm in the crowd that has a really hard time with that.

I'm just not a creative person. I consider myself a good developer when it comes to diving into an existing code base and figuring it out, fixing things and adding new features. But I simple cannot come up with stuff on my own. I've been trying ever since I was a kid and started programming, and now it's been 20+ years of drawing blanks when I try to "think of a project."

Hopefully I'm not alone in this :P

> I prefer to just get started by building something.

I think you're missing the point (of the original article). That's pretty much the issue here, some languages have such complicated ecosystems that you can't "just" build something.

To go from "ok I've written some code" to "it runs", sometimes it takes hours of wrestling with complicated tools and reading poorly written docs. It's infuriating.

Yeah, I think that was pretty much the author's point.

That is, until you get to the point where you want to automate your build and oh now you need to learn the clusterf*ck that's msbuild.

> (it is in the manual, but stack overflow has some better patterns).

I love how that's one of the things the author listed in their post :)

I currently live in Seattle, and I'm seriously considering somewhere in Idaho or Montana.

But on top of the corona situation I also have some pending life stuff that's still to be resolved. Depending on the outcome of that and my company being cool with full remote (no reason not to bring it up), I really wanna move somewhere cheaper.

> Iberian accents don't sound cultured and distinguished to most Mexicans

That's so interesting. I'm from Brazil, and to us Continental Portuguese sounds pompous, much like what a British accent sounds to an American listeners.

Different languages, I know, but interesting contrast considering both cases are related to the Iberian peninsula :)

I've been toying with Turbo Pascal 5.5 running on FreeDOS on an old laptop. There's something really relaxing about it, compared to modern programming.

I've played with OpenBSD on a VM a couple times and really liked it, but I'd like to use it on real hardware and try and force myself to use it as my main personal system at least for a while as an experiment.

I've often heard that Thinkpads make great OpenBSD laptops. Are there any models in particular the HN crowd would recommend? In terms of my hardware needs, I don't really care about graphics like you'd get with an Nvidia card, but I do need wi-fi since it'd be really hard to set up a wired connection to my router in my current apartment.

:)

That's really cool of him.

I do think there are options to achieve all of that - scale without manual intervention, etc. - without Kubernetes though. At least where I work, if I look at the deployment issues we have, those are all the product of bad decisions and lack of action due to higher priorities. There's no reason why there couldn't be more automation. They're building something new on Kubernetes which looks promising (though I really hope that as an app developer I don't have to think of Kubernetes things, which just irk me), but the current platform would work well too if investment was made into automating the parts that aren't automated.

That's great, thanks for sharing!

We have similar backgrounds in a way. I started coding as a kid too, at age 9. First Basic, then Pascal. Picked up C in my teens. Also tinkered with electronics and was part of an online robotics mailing list that was a lot of fun. It was very hard for me to get parts, living in the middle of nowhere in rural Southern Brazil, but some folks in the mailing list were super cool and shipped me parts from the US. I live in the US now.

I'm a CS major but took electives in embedded systems in college, and those were some of the most enjoyable classes I took. I'm now working on recalling some of that. Ordered some PIC parts and I'm currently taking an edX course on ARM programming.

My only problem right now is, I have no idea how I'd get into that space having a whole career built on server-side software.

How did you get into that space? What was your background? I hope you don’t mind me asking.

Interesting, I’m on the same boat. Embedded systems and low-level coding are my beacons of sanity.

I don’t really expect just to do the fun stuff at work, but modern technology seems to progressively burn me out more and more.

I was drawn to software at a time when it seemed like we had control over things. With the advent of the cloud I feel like that control keeps slipping away more and more. Kubernetes is my new nemesis. I seem to be in the minority that perceives it as unnecessarily complex for most tasks. Someone once commented here on HN that the k8s trend made them think people are trying to pretend their code doesn’t run on hardware anymore, and that really resonated with me.

I posted my anecdote here the other day if anyone’s interested: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22959688

That's how I read it too.

I've recently started doing that and it's been a breath of fresh air.

I don't really like the stuff I work with, which is services. I think I've become good at it given the feedback I get from my peers every review cycle, but I really don't like it.

I felt burned out for a long time because of that.

Recently I've simply been doing what I'm interested in, in my spare time. That's learning about embedded systems, something I had an interest in in college but never pursued a career. And for fun, tinkering with old stuff that makes me nostalgic. I spent this last weekend coding in Pascal and messing around with FreeDOS :)