Nearby, Garth noted
a recording of a group discussion with Leo Brodie, and I thought it might be good to share and to post some highlights perhaps with timestamps...
47 min about Chuck in person
1h15 writing a language for your problem
1h20 about block size not being a crucial thing
1h27 robots in space, benefits of small incremental updates
Note that YouTube offers a timestamped searchable transcript - it's not perfect, but it's useful.
GARTHWILSON wrote:
Yesterday (Sat, Mar 13, 2021) the facebook group "Forth2020 Users-Group" had a Zoom meeting with Leo Brodie, the author of "Starting Forth" and "Thinking Forth" which you can watch at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=--IJEl6HV2k . At about 1:26:30, one of the participants says that Forth is the future of robots in space, because of its incremental compilation. He works in this field, and says it's a huge problem if, for example, you have a very slow link to your spacecraft (because it's so many hundreds of millions of miles away and the signal is so weak when it reaches its destination) and you have to feed it some update code in C and you have a quarter of a gigabyte, whereas in Forth you might be able to get away with only a hundred bytes, because it's not necessary to re-compile anything.
Leo said in the meeting that Chuck Moore was not interested in how others did things. He wanted what worked best for what he needed, solving one problem at a time. He said you should do whatever you want, which is what Forth is good at. His quote was "What is the best way to do this for me?" Free thinkers. Someone in the video (I don't remember who) said that you don't really program in Forth, but instead use it to write a language that does what you want. and also nearbyQuote:
I seem to remember he said in another part of the video that there was nothing magical about the 1K block size. It kind of opens the way all the more for making 128x32 (or other size) blocks if you want to—not that you really needed permission, but it's easier to justify if you want to.