that was an absolutely fascinating (and very well written indeed) article. for those of you who tl;drd it, this bit towards the end was particularly insightful:
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Why pay this cost? Because I don’t do algorithms, other people do, so I have to trust them and respect their judgment to a large extent. Because you need superhuman abilities to work without layers. My minimal stack of layers is - problem, software, hardware. People working on the problem (algorithms, UI, whatever) can’t do software, not really. People doing software can’t do hardware, not really. And people doing hardware can’t do software, etc.
The Forth way of focusing on just the problem you need to solve seems to more or less require that the same person or a very tightly united group focus on all three of these things, and pick the right algorithms, the right computer architecture, the right language, the right word size, etc. I don’t know how to make this work.
My experience is, you try to compress the 3 absolutely necessary layers to 2, you get a disaster. Have your algorithms people talk directly to your hardware people, without going through software people, and you’ll get a disaster. Because neither understands software very well, and you’ll end up with an unusable machine. Something with elaborate computational capabilities that can’t be put together into anything meaningful. Because gluing it together, dispatching, that’s the software part.
So you need at least 3 teams, or people, or hats, that are to an extent ignorant about each other’s work. Even if you’re doing everything in-house, which, according to Jeff Fox, was essentially a precondition to “doing Forth”. So there’s another precondtion - having people being able to do what at least 3 people in their respective areas normally do, and concentrating on those 3 things at the same time. Doing the cross-layer global optimization.
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Why pay this cost? Because I don’t do algorithms, other people do, so I have to trust them and respect their judgment to a large extent. Because you need superhuman abilities to work without layers. My minimal stack of layers is - problem, software, hardware. People working on the problem (algorithms, UI, whatever) can’t do software, not really. People doing software can’t do hardware, not really. And people doing hardware can’t do software, etc.
The Forth way of focusing on just the problem you need to solve seems to more or less require that the same person or a very tightly united group focus on all three of these things, and pick the right algorithms, the right computer architecture, the right language, the right word size, etc. I don’t know how to make this work.
My experience is, you try to compress the 3 absolutely necessary layers to 2, you get a disaster. Have your algorithms people talk directly to your hardware people, without going through software people, and you’ll get a disaster. Because neither understands software very well, and you’ll end up with an unusable machine. Something with elaborate computational capabilities that can’t be put together into anything meaningful. Because gluing it together, dispatching, that’s the software part.
So you need at least 3 teams, or people, or hats, that are to an extent ignorant about each other’s work. Even if you’re doing everything in-house, which, according to Jeff Fox, was essentially a precondition to “doing Forth”. So there’s another precondtion - having people being able to do what at least 3 people in their respective areas normally do, and concentrating on those 3 things at the same time. Doing the cross-layer global optimization.