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by dTal
2522 days ago
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It is entirely and completely about high level vs low level. "High level" means details abstracted away and solved so you don't have to think about them. Our CPUs understand only the most primitive of instructions; the purpose of all software is to climb the ladder of abstraction, from a multiplication routine abstracting over repeated addition, to "Alexa, set an alarm for 8 AM." To write things yourself is the very essence of descending to a lower level. Abstraction comes at the price of loss of fidelity, yes - Alexa might not ask you to specify exactly what form your alarm will take - but the benefits are a vastly increased power/effort ratio. It's worth it, because most of the time you don't care exactly how a task is done - you just care that it IS done. And - mostly - your needs are not that special. Frankly, sharing information on how to do things so that others can build upon them is the only reason we have technology at all. Perhaps you've read "I, Pencil"? With a lifetime of effort and study, you would struggle to create a single pencil drawing from "scratch". Chuck Moore's supposedly astonishing productivity notwithstanding, I notice that all of the software I actually use is a heavily layered tower of abstraction (and, curiously, none of it is written by Chuck Moore). It appears that by and large the choice is between layered, multi-author code - and no code at all. https://fee.org/resources/i-pencil/ |
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Perhaps you never saw the images from the Philae space probe? Because that's an RTX2010 that powers it, one of Chuck Moore's designs.
Maybe you don't use Moore's software directly, but you never know when it has been used for you [1].
[1] https://wiki.forth-ev.de/doku.php/events:ef2018:forth-in-tha...