An interview with Chuck Moore, at Simple Talk. The publisher is interesting, as it is a web site for developers using Microsoft .NET and SQL Server. Neither one is noted for Chuck's emphasis for much of his life: simplicity.

For those who have never heard of Chuck Moore, he invented the Forth programming environment. I call it an environment because it is much more than a computer language. It is an interpreter, a compiler, editor and disk operating system. For most 8 bit processors, a typical installation is eight kilobytes. By way of comparison, the compiler, gcc, on my Ubuntu laptop runs to 204 kilobytes, and that's without the dynamically linked libraries (something Forth does not have or need). And that ignores the Perl, python, shell, C++ and Murphy knows what else compilers and interpreters.

Probably Forth's (and hence Chuck's) greatest contribution is its methodology. By keeping Forth so simple, Chuck made it incredibly powerful. Forth also inverts the normal programming process. With most languages, you use the language to write an application program, a long dull tedious process. With Forth, you write an application specific language. Then writing the application is trivial.

I know I learned a lot about computers and programming from Forth and Chuck. Thank you.

Originally published Friday, 2009-09-11 19:44 MDT