[selvor]

When he told about that in the Fireside chat, I was really puzzled at first. I think Chuck was just being the eccentric guy he is was telling a cautionary tale for the shock effect, in a kind of dark humorous way. Also the guy is 88 years old now, so it's somewhat understandable when your energy levels are extremely low, both physically and mentally. With the little time left of your life, you wouldn't want to spend it fixing some random breaking API change from Windows.

I imagine his ColorForth has been more like a retirement hobby for the past decade. He used to screenshare from his ColorForth during the calls, but that could have been overcome more easily with a VGA->HDMI capture dongle and running ColorForth natively. And I doubt he needed the TCP/IP stack directly on his ColorForth based on what he shared so far. So I don't see the point of porting over to Windows to begin with. After all, ColorForth runs more easily on bare metal, on UEFI/BIOS or whatever, so it didn't ever need BitBlt to draw things on screen for sure. The guy built a ColorForth processor, and the devkit from GreenArrays has a VGA connector, etc. So I believe Chuck was on to something else when he shared that, perhaps just to stimulate thinking, but people tend to take things at face value.

On another note, ColorForth (or FORTH for that matter) is not meant to be owned/controlled by him or a committee. So it's not like he was maintaining it. AFAIK, he didn't even endorse or support FORTH standardization efforts, and somewhere said it's silly. I also find it interesting that in his book A Problem Oriented Language, there is not a single mention of FORTH even once (except in the preface, and in his bio) yet he describes FORTH in the book, just calls it as "A Problem Oriented Language" without naming it. So it's almost like FORTH doesn't exist. It's just an idea. And what doesn't exist cannot be broken.

[bitwize]

Jonathan Blow is famously working on a programming language for games, called Jai; but he never mentions it by name when he streams. I think his concern is similar to Chuck Moore's: that the language should exist in the abstract, and when you start nailing it down too tightly by naming and standardizing it, you create problems later when you want to change those things. It's clay he can mold, something to experiment with. How much more true is that of Forth for Chuck.

The strange thing is that imho, as in many other things around language design, Scheme sort of had the right idea. I like having a well-defined semantics with wide agreement that I can write programs on. The fact that the Common Lisp standard is practically unchanged since the 80s, and the core of Ada has survived with only significantly useful extensions added on in later standards, is real neat to me, compared with C++0x/1x/2x being a completely different beast than the C++ of the 90s, and Rust and JavaScript undergoing constant churn. The RnRS process, historically, was all about defining a core that implementers could all agree on, calling it Scheme, and then letting implementers fuck around on top of that basis. R6RS and R7RS were controversial precisely because they deviated from this; although R7RS tried to please both the "small core" camp and the "Python with parens" camp. Which is kind of like trying to please both classic Sonic fans and post-Adventure Sonic fans.

But yeah, I think Chuck's advanced age and a general feeling of "I'm too tired for this shit" were the primary reasons for making that announcement. And you may be right, he may be just telling us not to get too attached to a particular artifact but to embrace the idea of Forth. Maybe the real ColorForth was the friends we made along the way. May the Forth be with you, my friend.