@requiem software that solves one problem for one person once is successful. any use that software sees beyond that first use is gravy; it did its job. and if someone writes a lot of software that in the end did its job they are a pretty damn good programmer, I reckon.
@requiem I think maybe we need to pursue new definitions of "scale" or find a new attribute to aspire to. Maybe "spread" or "inspire". "Yes, but can it spread?" 😆
@requiem That's one reason why I enjoyed Project Oberon so much. Although it's still not refined enough for day to day operation, it's really close. And although it's not super-hyper-optimized like Linux is (or can be, at least), it's plenty fast enough for personal use.
@requiem Should never be the case to be shamed for and writing this small software is a good learning curve to learn new technologies in the first place to write websites in new frameworks for example or even in new languages. Same with programs generally it's beneficial.
@requiem True, but... And it's not the programmer's fault, but it's hard, maybe impossible, to stop people from trying to take any piece of software and attempt to make it scale way beyond the intended scope. No matter how much you try to emphasise in the documentation it was only ever meant for you and a couple of friends, you'll eventually hear about a small island nation or african country that's attempting to implement it for their entire population.
@vertigo @requiem If I were going to start enhancing an old OS and adding drivers and such to it, I might actually go with Oberon. I just think that being an OS not written in C, C++, or Assembly, that it would be much more fun to play around with the inner workings. CollapseOS with its Forth-based system is the next one I'd look at. Oberon is a better programming language than forth though, IMO, for all but the very lowest end systems.
@vertigo @requiem Forth is a pretty interesting language. It's just a bit on par with ASM in terms of cognitive load to develop for. But it's very light weight and cross architecture, so it's fairly versatile and useful in some spaces. The GA144 chip is an interesting example of what you can do with its light weight design.
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@requiem @vertigo I'm mostly interested in its self-hosting nature on low end hardware, the ability to develop on a 25mhz 1mb system for itself is something you can't really do with the Arduino toolkits, Rust, GCC, etc. Even Micropython, though you can develop code for it without a separate system, can't compile micropython itself self-hosted. Forth's the same way though.
@requiem @vertigo I like that he made his own processor, and it makes a very good reference implementation, but I want to get back to playing with it on other available hardware. (Teensy 4.x, ESP32, Risc-V, and maybe using Gameduino Dazzler for graphics.) Lots of stuff to learn about the systems and compilers first though.