When I worked at Testra I was given the job of doing something that had never
been done before, which is write an assembler for a VLIW processor. It was my
idea for the assembler to do the out-of-ordering of the instructions. John Hart
had said to make the assembler source-code have rows representing opcodes
and columns representing fields in the opcodes that are executed in parallel
(one clock cycle per opcode), and have the assembly-language programmer
write his program in this two-dimensional manner --- humans can't figure this
out in their head though --- humans think sequentially (one-dimensional).
If DXforth had been hired at Testra he would have said:
"I'm waiting for a ready-made VLIW assembler to be available so you can purchase it.
In the meantime, I will dink around with this Z80 Forth system from R.G. Loeliger.
I expect to stay busy with this until at least 2021!"
My assembler (MFX) for the MiniForth was a rare circumstance because it
involved doing something that had not been done before and was difficult.
Most Forth programs (mayby 95%) are pretty mundane. For these, it is good
to have a standard Forth and code-libraries because getting the program written
quickly and making it easily maintainable is the goal, but being super-creative
is not needed or desired. Of course, the Forth standard has to be designed by
actual Forth programmers, not a retarded sales clown (Elizabeth Rather).
Back in 1995, Tom Hart told me that any maintenance programmer is equal
or better than I am, so I am expendable (he didn't have the money to continue
paying me, but he hoped to have more money in the future). After I left, the liar
began to say that I had not written MFX but that MFX had been written long before
I had arrived and I was just a stupid little maintenance programmer too.
This would have worked if MFX was one of the 95% of Forth programs that
are mundane and could easily be written by anybody. Now, a 1/4 century later
Tom Hart has yet to find any maintenance programmer who is capable of
understanding my MFX, and certainly not of writing something like that
from scratch. So Tom Hart has become a blatant liar, making a public spectacle
of himself in his failure --- he assumed that finding a maintenance programmer
would be easy --- now his shame is on display for the entire world!
I know a woman who designed a website many years ago. She describes this as
being done at the time when websites still involved creativity and programming,
rather than just being "cookie-cutter." Her boss (who was her own father) then
claimed that he had designed and built the website himself. She is no longer
on speaking terms with him because of this. That liar succeeded because he
took credit for something (a website) that was pretty mundane. For the woman,
this was a great accomplishment that she wanted credit for. Realistically though,
websites aren't all that great of an accomplishment --- her father could easily find
maintenance programmers who were capable of picking up her source-code and
running with it (I don't know the details, but it was most likely Perl). Her father
succeeded! Tom Hart failed though. Tom Hart is now the poster-boy of all liars
because he failed --- he thought he could succeed easily by hiring maintenance
programmers --- he failed though, so now everybody in the world sees that he is a liar.
P.S. That woman hates all programmers now. For her, the word "programmer"
is synonymous with "liar," "intellectual property thief" and "scoundrel."
If she sees a shop-lifter get arrested at WalMart she says:
"Look at that programmer in handcuffs!"
She assumes that all programmers steal intellectual property habitually,
and the actual creators of the software always get kicked out as she did.