On FORTH and a Friend

FORTH is a programming language with a lot of both interested and interesting users and implementers. Unbeknownst to you, your anti-lock brake controllers and fuel-injectors could be running by FORTH, and even if they aren’t, surely other critical parts of your vehicle are running on it, or diagnosed and maintained with it, or both.

The curious thing about the language is that its manifestation in this reality demonstrated how a single programming language could be both highly perform-ant and highly expressive. This is rare and uncommon. Today, no language achieve this feat. To consider that FORTH achieved it on limited computers, a long time ago, adds further wonder and respect for this delightful language. If you haven’t even taken at least a single look at it, then you should grab your copy of whatever you call hardware systems, along with the latest copy of gforth, to write hello world and play with the stack a little bit. It is interesting how much expressivity and power you can get out of a little computer system using this neat language. The language isn’t the most important thing though; it is the people.

When choosing a Scheme distribution, someone quipped that “When you choose one, you aren’t choosing a interpreter, so much as, you are choosing the a community”. This is true. Since it was tradition to implement your own FORTH interpreter, you could join a lot of different communities. The common traits among all of them were humans who could think for themselves, optimize at every level of the implementation (both software and hardware), and have a lot of fun doing it. One of those people was a best friend of mine named Bruce Langenbach.

Bruce passed away this year. His LinkedIn profile is still up; though I put in a request to retire it. For some bizarre reason, he never mentions FORTH on this resume. At Bear Automotive Service Equipment he used it to run all of the equipment (Bear sells automobile maintenance systems). The cool thing was that FORTH didn’t just run the equipment, it was also the operating system, code-editor, and debugger, all implemented and executed on-device. All of the REPL-joy that people blog about today was there long ago on little computers (which are somewhat dismissively called “micro-controllers” when in reality they are just computers like any others). That was a really, really fun job.

Bruce told me about it all of the time. It was the most fun job that he ever had. Anyone knows that with any job you have ups and downs. It is especially hard though when your first job is your best one. Fortunately he was investing in and exploring non-programming related forms of employment and expression. The neatest stuff was the encaustic painting.

Encaustic painting, using my simple understanding of it, uses layers of hot wax. It is beautiful, and, is a beautiful form of expression. Bruce was working on integrating LEDs and Arduino-systems with the canvas and the art. I loved hearing about it and was really, really looking forward to seeing what he was ready to share.

If he had been able to finish his work, he surely would have done it on FORTH. This implementation in particular says all of the right things, in spirit, intent, and implementation, and surely would have been a great place to start.

One Heart Apart

Can we help people out half the world away? If that is too far, then can we help our people on our own continent? If that is too far, then what about our state, our city, or even our next-door neighbors?
Humans are only as far away from us as we are from our own heart. When you gain access to your heart, you are instantly connected with all other human beings. Once connected, your next step is to do something about it.
Every human is only one heart apart from one another.
The space, compassion, love, and the sheer grandeur contained within the human heart make a trillion universes look like a sweet little grain of sand in comparison.

ALEC's a Language for Expressing Creativity

ALEC is the new configuration of my Emacs/Organization-Mode system. Just wanted to share some thoughts on the experience. The code says a lot, and the text, too, but I’m more interested in the experience.
For context, this is the next step of TC3F.
If nothing else, just know that the tangle time went down from 10m to 27 seconds :).

Continue reading “ALEC's a Language for Expressing Creativity”

Org-Mode Details To Accompany Questions

The details that are likely to help questions to be answered on the org mailing list.

(print emacs-version)
(print org-version)
(print (pp-to-string org-babel-default-header-args))
(print (pp-to-string org-babel-default-header-args:R))

=

Eg:

"24.3.1"
"8.2.10"
"((:eval . \"always\")
 (:padline . \"yes\")
 (:noweb . \"no-export\")
 (:exports . \"both\")
 (:results . \"output replace\")
 (:comments . \"noweb\")
 (:session . \"none\")
 (:cache . \"no\")
 (:hlines . \"no\")
 (:tangle . \"no\"))
"
"((:session . \"*R*\"))
"

To Revisit

To Revisit

Milwaukee Data Science: Making Sense of Data Science via a Metromap & Lightning Talks

This could be the start of something valuable community; can’t wait to see wherever it leads!

An example cause of burnout

There are many recipes for burnout.
One of them by analogy is to operate a 28 ton earth moving machine powered by a 2 horsepower (hp) engine attached to an unlimited fuel supply (use your imagination).
It doesn’t matter how capable the machine is or the value of the fuel you are using, the engine is insufficient, but will run for a while, before it “burns out”.

Happiness vs Enjoyment

Happiness and enjoyment are easily confused because they mostly feel the same.

Their major difference though seems to be the duration of the feeling and the
ease by which the state may be entered.

Happiness seems to be more long-lived while enjoyment seems to me short-lived.

Happiness seems to be mostly independent of the circumstances while enjoyment seems to
be mostly dependent upon the circumstances.

It seems like a worthwhile endeavor to explore where we invest our time, whether
it is in happiness or enjoyment, and evaluate the results of our investment.