Churk Moore retired colorforth after w11 update broke it
lobste.rsSad video to watch. I can't help but feel for the guy, even though I wouldn't know Forth from fifth except for being aware of its influence and its place at the root of an entire taxonomy of languages, and recalling that Chuck was its originator. (ngcc_hk, is it too late to fix the spelling of his name?)
Many if not most of us will be sitting in that chair someday, wondering why our code or our hardware broke for no apparent reason, yet again, and realizing that this time is different because we just don't have enough patience, motivation, or time left to deal with it.
Wish I knew exactly what went wrong. Did they yank DirectDraw out of Win32, or something?
A lot of us might experience similar things, but this seems somewhat unique.
He has a large amount of original low level code where he's the only maintainer, that doesn't work with standard dev tools.
A lot of non-hacker devs would probably have lost interest in, or totally rewritten a project to match modern APIs, long before it was likely to break like that.
Lots of people seem to be offering to help, but that doesn't seem to be what he wants.
He mentions a feeling of fate telling him to move on, hiking, and staying healthy, which seems much more interesting and important.
Agreed, there's a price to be paid for stepping off the well-trod path when it comes to dev tools/methodologies and OSes. The truth is that he'd have had a worse time in MacOS or Linux than in Windows, which is usually pretty fanatical about continuing to support old APIs and run old applications.
Also agreed that he isn't asking for help and doesn't appear to want it. Still, this sucks.
To us outsiders it's really hard to understand what's actually happening here, but it almost seems like the whole thing could even be a net positive for him, he seems to really feel a need for a new direction.
But that could just be my lack of understanding of the forth mindset and culture and the benefits it brought him.
Forth obviously did bring him a lot of happiness, but Forth people always seem like they have trouble getting anyone else to understand what they're doing, and it must be kind of isolating to spend so much time on something so few people understand.
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