Re: Hello - and where to begin?

Jeff Fox wrote:
> Well if I do it it would be for neural and expert systems and
> voice since those are my interests. Those are generally regarded
> as high-end high-performance scientific research applications
> although some people have built special purpose hardware.

I used to work for Floating Point Systems ... I'm intensely familiar 
with the battles between special-purpose and general-purpose hardware 
and why the economics are against special-purpose hardware. The window 
of opportunity for FPS in array processors and mini-supercompters was 
about 1974 -- 1990. Fifteen years or so, although I'd say only the first 
ten were really on the up side.

Now it's 15 + years later and massively parallel is back. This time I 
don't think the general-purpose people are going to take as long to 
catch up as they did last time. The parallel algorithms aren't any 
better now than they were then, the languages aren't any better now than 
they were then, etc.

> Right. Forth has a long history from early days in space to
> the classic space probes to all the military stuff of
> showing how to do things effectively with integer.

Yeah ... it *can* be done, but it's more work. I'm not sure they're even 
teaching it any more except in embedded shops where it's necessary. I 
learned all that stuff because I learned programming on one of the 
original Von Neumann machines, ILLIAC I. Guess what? Some people used a 
floating point interpreted order code on ILLIAC I. :)

> There has always been interest from high-end science
> for the kind of parallelism SEAforth will offer.  Not
> all scientific problems need to be expressed as gigantic
> arrays of floating point numbers.

Yeah ... I remember lattice gas methods. And the Thinking Machines 
Connection Machine. And MASPAR. And the Massively Parallel Processor. 
People with low budgets used tricks and hacks like that, and people with 
big budgets used things that were easier to program.


> Yes, but historically interconnect was inefficient and
> more expensive than processing.  The machines were
> fabulously expensive.   Nothing with the performance
> per watt or performance per $ has been done.  And
> the E in SEAforth is Embedded where the whole thing
> is about performance and power and $ costs.

The biggest bottleneck was programming and algorithms. I think it still is.

> Chuck once said that if you set out to design a chip with the
> intent of making it as difficult to program as possible you
> might end up with Pentium.  I don't think that's true.  There
> are things that are probably worse.  But clearly it is the
> opposite of what Chuck likes.

Actually, the Pentium isn't all that difficult to program. The world 
champion of programming difficulty was probably the Multiflow VLIW 
architecture. It actually *couldn't* be programmed by humans -- only a 
compiler could do it. Yet another beautiful theory murdered by a gang of 
brutal facts. :)

> I think the people who were willing and able to pay $400 to buy
> one and donate one demonstrate a different dynamic at work than
> the sell in the existing consumer market forces that you have
> highlighted.   But the degree to which intention, feeling,
> and charitable contributions will eventually play in OLPC
> is anyone's guess.
> 
> I am willing to put some energy into OLPC while I would
> only be embarrased to opt out for the cheapest computing
> toy laptop I could find given all else.  I am wishing
> OLPC the best but am not going to get into a fight with
> anyone about it.

[snip]

> Yes.  I wonder if something like Pablo Reda's work with
> children would be a good fit to a colorforth for OLPC project.

The OLPC project was really very firm on keeping the number of 
programming languages to a bare minimum, namely Python, Squeak Smalltalk 
and Open Firmware Forth. Of course with Mitch Bradley representing Forth 
and Alan Kay representing Smalltalk both senior members of the OLPC 
team, I wouldn't expect anything else. But if you have the "Linux port" 
of the Open Firmware Forth on the machine already, and can install 
gForth out of the Fedora repositories, is there a place for colorforth?

I'd like to try it, but then, I'd like to have an ELF executable 
colorforth I could run on my Athlon64 X2 under Linux 2.6.23. What are 
the chances of that happening? Is that something I could actually build 
myself?