Comments on: Developing LISA Pathfinder

By: gavenkoa

gavenkoa — Thu, 28 Oct 2010 19:56:23 +0000

Nice project with nice tools.

Forth is not very good lang for embedded as always turn into DSL and if some fail all blame Forth rather then own mistake.

By: physics musings » Blog Archive » You’re never too old

physics musings » Blog Archive » You’re never too old — Thu, 06 Apr 2006 01:07:42 +0000

[...] Until this fall, my work at IEEC is centered on software development. But once our application enters the testing and validation phases, i’ll have time to work on physics again. The Institute being a primarily a scientific institution, the plan is to get involved in LISA at a scientific level. Let me say that again: i’ll work on physics again. Who said dreams never come true? At first, a nagging doubt clouded my mind every now and then, a little devil whispering “you’re too old, you missed that train,” but i remembered a quote by one of my favourite authors: It is never too late to be what you might have been. [...]

By: jao

jao — Mon, 23 Jan 2006 21:13:22 +0000

arakyd, thanks for the recommendation and pointers. I’ve never used Forth, and much of what you say is news to me (specially, i didn’t know about the REPL). Albeit it’s a little late to consider it for LISA, i will definitely take a look at it for future projects.

Thanks for sharing!

By: arakyd

arakyd — Sun, 22 Jan 2006 04:27:41 +0000

Bare metal embedded systems: ahh, now that’s real programming.

Did you consider using Forth, or are you familiar with it? It’s nice for embedded systems, and it even has a history at NASA.[1] If you’re not familiar with it, it’s sort of like assembly language with powerful abstraction capabilities, somewhat similar to Lisp’s actually; it’s got a REPL, you write programs by extending the language, and all parts of the system are available to the programmer at all times, and can be modified on the fly, including the compiler.

A couple notes to (hopefully) pique your curiosity:

If you’ve seen Paul Graham’s page of quotes about Lisp,[2] you’ve probably seen the one that says “Lisp is a programmer amplifier”, and maybe you noticed that he’s got in parenthesis that this was first said by Chuck Moore about Forth. (Philip Koopman also makes this statement when he talks about Forth in his book about stack machines.[3])

Forth was invented by Chuck Moore in the 60′s,[4] and he’s still using and evolving it for his own purposes, according to his philosophy of brutal simplicity. (There are other Forths of varying interest floating around, and you can always roll your own.) To me he’s a little like Alan Kay: both of them were around in the early days of computing, both were highly impressed by Lisp, and both have very low opinions of the current state of the field.[5] They’ve gone in very different directions though; it would be fascinating to hear them have a conversation. It’ll never happen though.

[1] http://forth.gsfc.nasa.gov/
[2] http://paulgraham.com/quotes.html
[3] http://www.ece.cmu.edu/~koopman/stack_computers/sec7_2.html#721
[4] http://www.forth.com/resources/evolution/evolve_1.html
[5] http://64.233.161.104/search?q=cache:cZptjR3TZIwJ:ultratechnology.com/moore4th.htm+site:ultratechnology.com&hl=en