Path: csiph.com!eternal-september.org!feeder.eternal-september.org!news.eternal-september.org!.POSTED!not-for-mail From: Paul Rubin Newsgroups: comp.lang.forth Subject: Re: Charles Moore said you can replace all crap with .1% the code Date: Mon, 17 Oct 2016 17:02:05 -0700 Organization: A noiseless patient Spider Lines: 24 Message-ID: <87pomypls2.fsf@nightsong.com> References: <9feed3da-dfa7-448a-a42a-fbbf5ced3f43@googlegroups.com> <20161017191434.5ed224af@_> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain Injection-Info: mx02.eternal-september.org; posting-host="83001dd37c405f0a679a23e90e83ad7a"; logging-data="11937"; mail-complaints-to="abuse@eternal-september.org"; posting-account="U2FsdGVkX19WNH4cvu4SF86w4C6DjI6D" User-Agent: Gnus/5.13 (Gnus v5.13) Emacs/24.3 (gnu/linux) Cancel-Lock: sha1:rNr8w0EJVJiRuhSFKIGVBJIYuOE= sha1:/2np6bDp6RGtMf4uCZfAuR8k8sc= Xref: csiph.com comp.lang.forth:51957 Rod Pemberton writes: > Have you placed his statement into it's appropriate historical > context? What year was this statement made? On an ancient 8-bit > micro-computer without memory and without much hardware to program, > when using threaded-code, this might've once been a realistic > statement,... With plenty of hardware to program in modern computers > and the very large or complex software packages of today, I don't view > his comment as a realistic statement anymore. I took it as being about today's software (or 5 years ago or whenever he gave that talk). And I interpreted it as meaning that given a high-level description of the problem, he can deliver a solution 1% of the size of today's software. An example might be word processing: many perfectly good word processors ran on 32 kilobyte CP/M systems, Apple II's, etc. Microsoft Word today is at least 1000x bigger. Yes it has a lot more crap in it, but that stuff reaches outside the essence of the problem. Myself, I ported Col. G. L. Sicherman's "roff" program to Turbo C and used it for many years on a 4.77 mhz Toshiba laptop, even in the post-Unix era: http://www.cise.ufl.edu/class/cop4600/minix/src/commands/simple/roff.c