His "computers should figure out how to talk to each other" immediately reminded me the "computers should heal themselves" one finds in "objects have failed" from the same author. Both shells seem equally empty to me.
Also, if you want more fuel, you might find funny that he refers to GreenArrays in his section about parallel computing. Chuck Moore, the guy behind it, is probably the last and ultimate "binary programmer" on this planet. But at the same time, he invented a "reverse syntax highlighting", where you set the colors of your tokens in order to set their functionq, in a non-plain-text-source system (see ColorForth).
I have no idea why you're calling Chuck Moore a "binary programmer", by the definition given in today's talk.
Forth is anything but machine code. Forth and Lisp both share the rare ability to describe both the lowest and the highest layers of abstraction equally well.
Chuck Moore is definitely an interesting guy. It's hard to stereotype him, but he is definitely closer to the metal than most other language designers.
For one thing, Forth is the machine code for the chips he designs. Moreover, in his various iterations of his systems on the x86, he was never afraid to insert hex codes in his source when he needed too, typically in order to implement his primitives, because he judged that an assembler was unnecessary. At one point he tried to build a system in which he coded in something rather close to object code. This system led him to his colorForth, in which you actually edit the object code with a specialized editor that makes it look like you're editing normal source code.
Forth does absolutely not share the ability to describe both high and low level equally well. Heck, Moore even rejects the idea of "levels" of programming.
Bret Victor's talk wasn't about any particular technology. It was about being able to change your mind. It's not important that "binary programmers" programmed in machine code. It's important that they refused to change their minds. We should avoid being "binary programmers" in this sense.
> For one thing, Forth is the machine code for the chips he designs.
You're right, I should've said Forth isn't just machine code.
> Forth does absolutely not share the ability to describe both high and low level equally well. Heck, Moore even rejects the idea of "levels" of programming.
This is a misunderstanding. He rejects complex programming hierarchies, wishing instead to simply have a programmer-Forth interface and a Forth-machine interface. He describes programming in Forth as building up the language towards the problem, from a lower level to a higher level:
"The whole point of Forth was that you didn't write programs in Forth, you wrote vocabularies in Forth. When you devised an application, you wrote a hundred words or so that discussed the application, and you used those hundred words to write a one line definition to solve the application. It is not easy to find those hundred words, but they exist, they always exist." [1]
Also:
"Yes, I am struck by the duality between Lisp and Lambda Calculus vs. Forth and postfix. But I am not impressed by the productivity of functional languages." [2]
Here's what others have said:
"Forth certainly starts out as a low-level language; however, as you define additional words, the level of abstraction increases arbitrarily." [3]
Do you consider Factor a Forth? I do.
"Factor allows the clean integration of high-level and low-level code with extensive support for calling libraries in other languages and for efficient manipulation of binary data." [4]
