Chuck Moore TEDx Talk - December 2014

[Jason Damisch]

I just now found this video

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tb0_V7Tc5MU

I was not aware that Chuck gave a TED talk.

Jason

[Richard Owlett]

For us in boonies on dial-up, "What is TED?" ;/

[Paul Rubin]

Richard Owlett <row...@cloud85.net> writes:
> For us in boonies on dial-up, "What is TED?" ;/

TED (ted.com) is a lecture series where celebrity nerds pontificate
about topics they might or might not know something about.

Chuck's talk was actually TEDx, for "TED Extended" or something like
that. A more spread-out adjunct to TED.

I remember Chuck's talk got discussed here a few months ago when it
first went online. I liked that he was wearing his Five Fingers shoes
while giving it.

[visua...@rocketmail.com]

This video is available at TEDx itself also:
http://tedxtalks.ted.com/video/Software-Past-and-Future-|-Char

It's a little bit easier to understand than on YouTube, but there are no subtitles and no transcript which both are found on TEDx very often.

Two remarks are really interesting:
Forth would take a 10MB software package written in C to a 10kB written in Forth, "nobody wants to know" - and: "You don't want a disruptive technology that will put 9 million programmers out of work!"

In Chucks opinion the Forth community meanwhile is reduced to a few thousands of Forth-programmers, because companies using Forth made it a trade secret.

Hearing this I would say C is the mainstream because C-programmers have to be very communicative, speaking with other C-programmers and asking them for help.
Forth is so easy, and that I don't need help.

Would be great to have a full transcript. I would do it, if my hearing would be better.

"Forth let's you do anything, but not everything!"

[Mark Wills]

On Friday, 10 July 2015 07:28:39 UTC+1, visua...@rocketmail.com wrote:
>
> Would be great to have a full transcript. I would do it, if my hearing would be better.
>

Fortunately for you, I have some neat software called Dragon Naturally
Speaking, which is a software Dictaphone thingy. So, I just spoke what
I heard, tidied it up a bit, and voila.

Enjoy.

Mark

Chuck Moore TEDx Transcript
---------------------------
Howdy. Thank you for being here. I moved into this area about 15
years ago from Silicon Valley. And I love it here. I moved first
to Ceracuse city in California, which is on Pacificest trail, or
long trail. I hiked it many times. Then I moved to [assets?],
which is 5 miles closer to the ridge of Sierra, then to incline
Village, then Carson City, and now I'm living in Wellington. In
all this gyration Reno has remained my central city. The libraries
are fantastic, I'm a great library person; have been ever since I
started this genre of software development, basically.

I invented the forth language in 1968. That was the same time that
C was invented. It was a wondrous wondrous creative period for
inventing languages - computer languages. Fortran, COBOL, Algol,
Lisp, C.

Basically there are three kinds of computer languages - based on
their notation, C for instance has expressions like A+ B equals
something. It's called infix notation; the operator is in between
the two arguments. Lisp has a prefix notation, which would be
+ A B with the operator coming first. Forth is postfix notation
when you have A B +. Now in my mind, that is by far the superior
notation. [Laughter] it leads to much, much simpler programs. For
instance in C you have a lot of parenthesis. In Lisp you have an
enormous number parenthesis. And in forth you have no parenthesis.
So it's a much more natural language for human beings who did not
learn algebra in, is it grade school? Algebra teaches you to put
the operators in between the arguments which is unnatural, the
operator really goes last you have a column of numbers and the sum
is at the bottom, the sum is the last thing you develop.

So I developed forth and I tried to, er, I used it very profitably
in my programming. I convinced a few other people to use it back
in the 70s there was quite a community of thousands of forth
programmers all over the world, a lot of them in Germany and
Russia and China, and it's faded. There are still thousands of
forth programmers but they're invisible. Partly because forth can
be used as a trade secret - if you write forth programs there'll
be smaller, faster, and bug free, and these are attributes that
people don't like to share. They like to hold them close.

I took great pride in writing programs that I could use to do
things that I wanted to do. I had to write programs for other
people in order to earn money, but those were not really
[unintelligible] experiences; it is better to do my thing my way.
One of the first things I did was to design circuit boards. So
it's very convenient that this slide is up there! [Laughter].

I would like to suggest that some of you, some of the younger of
you might like to write their own software. Back in the 70s that's
what you did; you could not buy software there wasn't software to
buy. And I thought the future would be everyone writing their own
software using the most efficient and simplest language they
could, until Bill Gates came along and persuaded everybody to buy
software, instead of building it. In fact his genius was he
persuaded you to buy it over and over and over again! [Laughter]
and that is the way he corrected the bugs and lack of features in
the original versions.

Forth software is simpler than C software. Windows is programmed
in C, Linux is programmed in C, OS I think is programmed in C.
There's only two languages in the world today. Three. C, Java, and
forth. And you'd never heard of forth, but it is orbiting Saturn.

The first program I wrote for my own use was to design circuit
boards, and all it required was a small forth program, and the
ability to draw rectangles. That is a good exercise in programming
if you can find a language any language on a computer that you
have a new can draw pictures draw rectangles and move them around
and make circuit boards. You can see the rectangles. Most lines
are rectangles, and most... well these contacts are hexagons, but
they could be rectangles, and you can do something nontrivial and
have a lot of fun doing it. You can add a lot of colour. Draw
colour pictures. And that's fun.

The reason for doing it is that current languages can do
everything. C is designed to do everything you want to do.
Windows is designed to let you do everything you want to do. Forth
does not do that. Forth let's you do anything, but not everything.
Forth is what I call extensible. If you want to add a new command
to do something that you did not anticipate wanting to do you can
do that easily. You can build a language in whatever direction you
want to go. Everything isn't there at the beginning, so you don't
have that overhead. Now the overhead is significant.

To design circuit board might take a megabyte of code. In forth it
would take a kilobyte. Three orders of magnitude less code. Three
orders of magnitude, not 1%, but one 10th of one percent the
amount of code. I have demonstrated this numerous times, but
nobody wants to know. There is a whole industry built up around
large inefficient buggy software. It starts with Windows
[laughter]. It even goes into the standards committee with this
bug they found recently in the secure socket layer. You might say
it's shocking, you might say it's fraudulent, you might say it's a
conspiracy, but it's good business because people are willing to
pay money, it makes a lot of jobs. You don't want a destructive
technology that will put 9 million of the 10 million programmers
out of work. But you can write your own software, do your own
thing and get a lot of satisfaction from it. It's a lot more fun
than crossword puzzles.

After designing circuit boards I thought it would be fun to design
computer chips. So I took the same philosophy I used with the
circuit boards and I shrank it down three orders of magnitude and
designed a computer chip. It isn't as hard as you might think.
In fact it really is quite easy, all you have to do is draw
rectangles - the fact that the rectangles are tiny instead of
macroscopic is not important - and you lay out these rectangles
nicely, three or four layers of them, and you have a computer
chip.

To actually make such a chip will cost you from $5000-$25 million
depending on exactly what you're doing - it's really not
affordable, but actually making the chip is not important. What
you want to do is design it, and simulate, and test it in virtual
space instead of real space. If you've got a really hot design
that you like and you can convince someone else to finance it
then you've got a product. Now we've got a product: we've got 144
computers on a 1 cm chip in a very conservative technology, the
cost is $5000 to make in small quantities. So it can be done. Why
would you do that? Personally I'm doing it to prove how everyone
else is doing a bad job! [Laughter] My software is maybe 100 kB to
design a chip. Cadence and retro graphics, the standard tools that
the industry uses to design chips they're 100 MB. You hear of
programs that contain a million lines of code. I know that the
software used in fighter planes, the F-22, has more than 1 million
lines of code - several million. A million lines of code is mind
boggling - it would be a stack of paper this deep. You can't read
a million lines of code, never mind write it. You have a thousand
people contributing to a million lines of code. Nobody knows what
it does. No one person does, it takes the entire corporation to
know what that code does. And, no one in that corporation can
answer your question were you to ask it. You have to trust that
somehow it all works together, and we all know how badly it works:
Windows comes out every year and it's, well it's probably a
million lines of code I don't know how big but this is as big as
some of them. Big codes. Big codes are for weather forecasting,
for nuclear test simulation for coordinating the motion of all
the ships in the world. There are big problems, and there are big
data, but they don't require big programs. You can see this
yourself when you download an app to your smart phone. The apps
are 10 MB of code. 10 MB. If you were to do that in forth it would
be 10 kB. On the other hand I would have them program the entire
phone in order to get that kind of advantage and so far I've been
unwilling to program on the smart phone. Maybe I will! [laughter]
I have a hundred and forty-four little computers that can do it.

You do need memory to store images, you need memory for large
databases, memory is a good thing, but memory is not a good thing
to store the software because 10 MB of code has bugs. 10 kB of
code does not. If you want efficiency, if you want compactness, if
you want reliability, you want small programs. That means the
program can't do everything but it can do anything.

We have written a browser in forth. It was small, it wasn't as
small as I would make it because I didn't like the way they were
doing it but it's possible, you could write an email application.
The way phones work, the way everything works in this world,
people don't really write software any more. They take software
packages from various sources and stick them together. It's the
same way of doing software [I think he meant to say Hardware] the
software [hardware?] In the cellphone contains a chip which does
amazingly many things - a component from here, a component from
there, all glued together. This uses ten times as much energy, ten
times as much area, ten times as much design effort as it needs to
but that's the way people are doing things nowadays. Not a
conspiracy. It just seems to be the easiest way to do it. It's the
way the corporate managers want you to do it. It doesn't have to
be that way. You can do better, smaller, faster cheaper, and it's
up to the younger generation, coming along to change some of these
trade-offs. The way you do it is to write a little program that
does something you're interested in, showing off a little bit, and
prove it. Write your own software.

One of the things about forth that's perhaps held it back: it's
very easy to write a forth operating system. It only takes about
ten K of code. Everyone who got interested in forth wrote their
own system, so there's many systems out there. If you want to know
about it just do a Google and you'll find all kinds of references.
I have a website out there called colour forth.com that's
COLORFORTH. The company and working with now is called Green
arrays, they have a website. There's a fourth.com website which
has been around for as long as the Internet. Lots of information
out there. It's a fun thing and I'm very pleased to have been
involved in it.

The conventional way of doing things is not always the right way.
It was probably arranged as a historical accident, and that's kind
of true for us also. Forth came along and became what it is more
or less accidentally. If I had not invented forth I don't think it
would have been invented. It is not a popular way of doing things,
there is no great opportunity working there, it's turned out to be
a good thing and I'm very proud of it, and I thank you for
listening to me.

[Applause]

[visua...@rocketmail.com]

Thank you so much, Mark! That's awesome!

Reading your transcript, I recognize that before that I understood less than 50% of what Chuck said. Your software-tool is amazing. I have to look after it.

Great to read his explanation:

"Lisp has a prefix notation, which would be + A B with the operator coming first. Forth is postfix notation when you have A B +."

People complain about Forth' postfix notation, but it is interesting, that Lisp is well known despite it's prefix notation. To me that means, nobody should complain about Forth' postfix. He should take a look at Lisp.

Now we have to find out how to upload your text to TEDx and/or to YouTube, but first it needs some proofreading (your phonewriter isn't perfect - I am sure it is not possible to make such a thing perfect).

One thing has to be corrected immediately:

Chuck said "You don't want a disruptive technology" - your phonewriter made "destructive" out of this. I could understand just that part, because I have read a lot about "disruptive technology", and I know Forth is a disruptive technology, even if there is one abnormality: normally disruptive technologies are disrupting a market, bringing huge companies to fall, and start new prospering shooting star companies. There are enough reports about that.

Meanwhile we'll wait until Forth has it's time.
Maybe this will be soon.
Never know.
Stay put!

Dirk.

P.S.: "We have written a browser in forth" Chuck said. That's what I am looking for next.

[Paul Rubin]

visua...@rocketmail.com writes:
> P.S.: "We have written a browser in forth" Chuck said. That's what I
> am looking for next.

I think he meant the iTV browser using the i21 chip (related to F21, I
think). Some info is at: http://www.ultratechnology.com .

[visua...@rocketmail.com]

On Friday, July 10, 2015 at 4:53:19 PM UTC-4, Paul Rubin wrote:

Thanks, Paul!

"In 1995 I joined a NASA startup called the iTV Corporation with Chuck Moore. The idea was to build web appliances with a chip that was a variation of F21, iTV's i21. I became Director of Software at iTV. I trained the staff and we wrote the 4os operating system and made various all Forth chip and all Forth software web browser and email appliances. After developing products that everyone liked iTV's Board of Directors decided that they didn't want to sell anything and the company was shut down."

I guess I read about this earlier. As far as I know, everything was declared as trade secret and everything was destroyed with the shutdown. What a blow!

May be somebody has better news.

[Pablo Hugo Reda]

Mark

Thank you for this transcript, for me, listen english is dificult and this help very much.

Pablo

[rickman]

This is such a bizarre story. There has to be more to it. Why would
any rational capitalist not want to make money on an investment? Why
would they develop good products and not sell them if they could? Why
would they invest in a company only to wipe it off the face of the earth
rather than to sell the designs, the technology if not the company?

There must be parts of this story that aren't being told.

--

Rick

[humptydumpty]

On Saturday, July 11, 2015 at 6:42:42 PM UTC+3, rickman wrote:

Hi!

Maybe more money.

Have a nice day,
humptydumpty

[Jason Damisch]

On Saturday, July 11, 2015 at 8:42:42 AM UTC-7, rickman wrote:

> This is such a bizarre story. There has to be more to it.
> Why would any rational capitalist not want to make money
> on an investment?

I don't know. Maybe some people are lazy and by the time they
were ready to go to market, the profit margins would have been
rather small for their stuff.

Jason

[Stephen Pelc]

On Sat, 11 Jul 2015 11:42:39 -0400, rickman <gnu...@gmail.com> wrote:

>This is such a bizarre story. There has to be more to it. Why would
>any rational capitalist not want to make money on an investment?

There are tax regimes in which investors do better after a while if
the company fails.

Capitalism is the extraordinary belief that the nastiest of men for
the nastiest of motives will somehow work for the benefit of all.
attributed to John Maynard Keynes

Stephen

--
Stephen Pelc, steph...@mpeforth.com
MicroProcessor Engineering Ltd - More Real, Less Time
133 Hill Lane, Southampton SO15 5AF, England
tel: +44 (0)23 8063 1441, fax: +44 (0)23 8033 9691
web: http://www.mpeforth.com - free VFX Forth downloads

[rickman]

On 7/11/2015 3:05 PM, Stephen Pelc wrote:
> On Sat, 11 Jul 2015 11:42:39 -0400, rickman <gnu...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> This is such a bizarre story. There has to be more to it. Why would
>> any rational capitalist not want to make money on an investment?
>
> There are tax regimes in which investors do better after a while if
> the company fails.

You mean the company won't make enough profit to justify the investment,
so they are better off taking the loss rather than selling out and
putting money elsewhere?

That doesn't explain why the company didn't have any value and would be
completely shut down. Tax write offs aren't worth all that much. Their
only value is in offsetting profits to eliminate the taxes on them. I
can do the same thing by giving to charity.

--

Rick

[hughag...@gmail.com]

I wouldn't watch any TED-Talk --- that is a show featuring crackpots who take themselves seriously but get laughed at by the rest of the world --- the show is similar to the television show "Real People" that was on in early 1980s (it wasn't until after I graduated from high-school in 1984 that I stopped watching television). Jill Hansen was on TED-Talk and gave a rambling discussion of spirituality and surfing. Most viewers thought that it was hilarious. It is actually uncool to laugh at people who are mentally ill though. As for Charles Moore's Five-Fingers shoes, I suspect that the guests are required to wear something clownish or they aren't allowed on the show. The people who agree to go on the show are typically desperate for publicity (Jill Hansen trying to sell her own line of surfer-wear after ASP declined to accept her as a professional surfer), and they believe in the old adage: "There is no such thing as bad publicity."

On the subject of Jill Hansen (who attempted to murder Elizabeth Rather), she has recently been judged to be mentally competent. Her "innocent by reason of insanity" plea fell through, so there will be a trial (a person would have to be crazy to think that pleading insanity will actually work). This is bad news for both Jill Hansen and Elizabeth Rather.

It is bad news for Jill Hansen because if she gets convicted (she will), then she will go to prison --- prison is much more arduous than a puzzle-factory (free room-and-board without getting a job).

It is bad news for Elizabeth Rather too, because a trial tends to bring out a lot of evidence. In any murder investigation the obvious question that gets raised is if the victim had any enemies --- the fact that Elizabeth Rather was suing Apple Computer for using the word "swift" is going to come up! After the attempted murder, while Jill Hansen was waiting at her apartment for the police to come arrest her, she posted this message on Facebook: "I am becoming a professional! I have worked SOOOO hard to get to today. I am so greatful [sic] for all the support of the surfers and the ASP (association of surfing professionals)." This really seems to imply that getting accepted into the ASP was the payment for committing murder. It would also be interesting to find out if her father received any large sum of money at this time, and from whom.

I think that when Jill Hansen had her 30th birthday (a scary threshold for any woman), she realized that she wasn't going to get accepted into ASP. Her father also likely told her that he wasn't going to continue supporting her into her 30s, and it was time for her to move from Hawaii to somewhere less expensive stateside and get a job (WalMart greeter by day, pole-dancer by night). Her father then offered her an alternative future in which she would be accepted by ASP and would also get free room-and-board for the rest of her life without having to get a job. So Jill said: "Really??? Who do I have to kill?"

[visua...@rocketmail.com]

On Saturday, July 11, 2015 at 3:05:39 PM UTC-4, Stephen Pelc wrote:
>
> Capitalism is the extraordinary belief that the nastiest of men for
> the nastiest of motives will somehow work for the benefit of all.
> attributed to John Maynard Keynes
>
> Stephen
>

And what is the benefit of all in this case?

[Stephen Pelc]

On Mon, 13 Jul 2015 11:29:46 -0700 (PDT), visua...@rocketmail.com
wrote:

In which case? The people of Detroit and Greece may seriously
wonder about the benefits of capitalism.

I recently listened to an Australian podcast by an econonomics
professor that talks about "punishers" and "enlargers". The ability of
politicians to persuade people to vote against their own interests is
quite stunning.

[Anton Ertl]

Given that both Keynes and Adam Smith (who invented the "invisible
hand" metaphor <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invisible_hand> that
Keynes refers to here) were macroeconomists, it's probably the GNP.

Whether a larger GNP really benefits all is doubtful however.
International economic treaties are often justified with increases in
GNP, but it seems to me that the result is lower wages in countries
where the GNP is supposedly rising.

- anton
--
M. Anton Ertl http://www.complang.tuwien.ac.at/anton/home.html
comp.lang.forth FAQs: http://www.complang.tuwien.ac.at/forth/faq/toc.html
New standard: http://www.forth200x.org/forth200x.html
EuroForth 2015: http://www.mpeforth.com/euroforth2015/euroforth2015.htm

[Alex McDonald]

on 13/07/2015 22:42:40, wrote:
> On Mon, 13 Jul 2015 11:29:46 -0700 (PDT), visua...@rocketmail.com
> wrote:
>
>>On Saturday, July 11, 2015 at 3:05:39 PM UTC-4, Stephen Pelc wrote:
>>>
>>> Capitalism is the extraordinary belief that the nastiest of men for
>>> the nastiest of motives will somehow work for the benefit of all.
>>> attributed to John Maynard Keynes
>>>
>>> Stephen
>>>
>>And what is the benefit of all in this case?
>
> In which case? The people of Detroit and Greece may seriously
> wonder about the benefits of capitalism.
>
> I recently listened to an Australian podcast by an econonomics
> professor that talks about "punishers" and "enlargers". The ability of
> politicians to persuade people to vote against their own interests is
> quite stunning.
>
> Stephen
>

The average voter's interests are made up of any number of short term
gratifications. Politicians have their own interests, which, being
equally short term and venal, result in promises that are the
intersection of the two.

[Bernd Paysan]

Anton Ertl wrote:
> Given that both Keynes and Adam Smith (who invented the "invisible
> hand" metaphor <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invisible_hand> that
> Keynes refers to here) were macroeconomists, it's probably the GNP.
>
> Whether a larger GNP really benefits all is doubtful however.
> International economic treaties are often justified with increases in
> GNP, but it seems to me that the result is lower wages in countries
> where the GNP is supposedly rising.

It's the relation of debt and growth. To repay your debt, you need growth,
because you have to pay more than you got.

Adam Smith's economics however are about efficiency. The invisible hand
will make a country more efficient, and richness comes only as second order
effect - if you are more productive, you can affort more of those now
cheaper things.

The whole thing had become nonsense with the introduction of finance
products. A finance product is just money in another form. That way, by
making more and more and more complex finance products, you can inflate your
economy. The real world economics may be smaller and smaller by being more
efficient (or people being poorer and can't afford things), but the fake
economics, which is just empty buying and selling of money, lets the GNP
grow, and so your debt appears to be sustainable. Unless the finance sector
collapses, in which case you realize it isn't anymore. And then, the death
spiral of your economy begins, and it becomes critical, when the shortage of
money affects the real economy (as in Greece now).

--
Bernd Paysan
"If you want it done right, you have to do it yourself"
net2o ID: kQusJzA;7*?t=uy@X}1GWr!+0qqp_Cn176t4(dQ*
http://bernd-paysan.de/

[Jason Damisch]

On Thursday, July 30, 2015 at 3:47:37 PM UTC-7, Bernd Paysan wrote:

> Adam Smith's economics however are about efficiency.

> The whole thing had become nonsense with the introduction of
> finance products.

I agree with you Bernd.

[polymorph self]

youtube yaron brook, you are deep in the tax parasite bubble, get rid of tax parasites and capitalism is endless boom, dont confuse crony communism with capitalism, germany should go 100% atomic with thorium tek, and end all welfare and 99% regualtions, end public school fire all lawyer professor and judge adn social worker, remove restrictions on business, and endless boom, housign would be insanely awesoem with no building codes or insurance requirements or rules aaginst building, sure sure for fraud both nothing more

[polymorph self]

those people need capitalism and to cut off the tax parasites, reduce government spending to 1% gdp, and get rid of 99% regulations

then capitalism endless boom comes same as hong kong

[foxaudio...@gmail.com]

And what's more, most leaders fail to realize that the foundation of the economy changes with new financial products and fiat currency and they continue to act as if everything is the same as the time of Adam Smith.

I think we are seeing a point of inflection in the West now as a result of things like this.

BF

We now resume our regularly scheduled Forth Programming discussions...