An interview with Chuck Moore, at Simple Talk. The publisher is interesting, as it is a web site for developers using Microsoft .NET and SQL Server. Neither one is noted for Chuck's emphasis for much of his life: simplicity.
For those who have never heard of Chuck Moore, he invented the Forth
programming environment. I call it an environment because it is
much more than a computer language. It is an interpreter, a
compiler, editor and disk operating system. For most 8 bit
processors, a typical installation is eight kilobytes. By way of
comparison, the compiler, gcc, on my Ubuntu laptop
runs to 204 kilobytes, and that's without the dynamically linked
libraries (something Forth does not have or need). And that ignores
the Perl, python, shell, C++ and Murphy knows what else compilers
and interpreters.
Probably Forth's (and hence Chuck's) greatest contribution is its methodology. By keeping Forth so simple, Chuck made it incredibly powerful. Forth also inverts the normal programming process. With most languages, you use the language to write an application program, a long dull tedious process. With Forth, you write an application specific language. Then writing the application is trivial.
I know I learned a lot about computers and programming from Forth and Chuck. Thank you.