Forth, A Minimalistic Development Environment Of Long-Ago Offers Lessons For Today

Henry Neugass, Embedded Systems Consultant (Emeritus), Palo Alto, CA

Stevenson Hall 1300
11:00 AM - 11:50 AM

The Forth language/system, which was perfectly adapted to the very constrained environments of the 1970s - 80s, is an example of an elegant and generally transparent implementation. And Forth's inherent extensibility gave users unprecedented control of procedural abstraction. For productivity and basic joy-of-coding, you should evaluate each project --and each job offer-- accordingly. Today, we're accustomed to essentially infinite --and cheap-- computing resources. Are the values of elegance and transparency still relevant? Abstraction is a fundamental of computing, but there's an often-hidden overhead cost due to increasing abstraction.