Re: Hello - and where to begin?

Dear Ray,

Thank you for the welcome.  It is good to see your website back now (I 
had the broken link in my bookmarks from the last time I looked at 
colorForth).

> Can you please elaborate on the machine that you acquired? I am also
> interested in finding such a machine. I am planning a trip to Europe
> this spring and would love to have a machine that I could rely on in
> the event that I am called on to demonstrate colorforth.
>   
It's a Gateway SOLO2150.  Part No. 3500673, manufactured 08/06/00, and 
came with Windows 98.  I can't remember what the processor is, and 
Partition Magic has messed up the Windows boot so I can't look at the 
present.

> I will share this. At one point, I thought that my interest in
> colorforth was totally irrational and without merit. I even thought my
> interest was due to a condition I am currently undergoing treatment
> for.
>
> I had it well explained to me by someone I respect in the forth
> community. To put his experience in context, he had never tried the
> system, but suffice it to say that he could read the code and well
> understand the individual systems. He could also well elaborate how
> these systems interrelated. His points were well made and not
> incorrect. And yet I could not help my interest even after such a well
> stated argument.
>
> I have reversed my thinking yet again, and re-enter the community
> refreshed. Irrational is the OS that requires the specifications of
> last years machine just to run this years OS, requiring more machine
> to do anything else but OS stuff.
>
> I'm starting to think that colorforth is not for programmers, it's for
> designers and explorers. Programmers like programming environments
> that do the work for them and that's why programmers create such
> systems for other programmers. Designers on the other hand, like it
> when the thing they use to design something actually turns into that
> something they are designing, in a form where you couldn't possibly
> remove another piece and still get the functionality that is required
> to solve the specific, as opposed to a general, problem.
>
> Modeling clay for your machine/mind connection.
>
> Chuck has left us with a framework. Any piece of which is suspect. All
> the pieces together forming a unique whole.
>
> I still say to that other forther that I respect so much, "You have
> not used it, you don't know, and I can only tell you how to make love,
> not how to feel it". :-) or things that equal that.
>
> Once someone gets past the build of the system, obviously a hard thing
> to ask an experience forther, if one were to start with the interface
> and the paradigm and forget the encryption method ...
>
> ( which is quite replaceable and I've never found reason to... but
> after all it is...or frankly any portion of the system is, we see
> keyboards go from Chuck-vorak to qwerty all the time...)
>
>
> ... or the underlying system, and think about the way one solves
> problems, and how one goes about reducing those solves into tighter
> and more definitive factorings, using only the simplest of
> constructions...
>
> This is colorforth. The quicker picker upper
Are there any other computer languages that arouse such philosophical 
discourse and soul searching?