on a zoom call Chuck Moore the author of Forth announced that Windows updates have rendered his otherwise working colorForth system inoperable and unfixable. moving to another operating system would amount to a rewrite. as a result he said it's "time to move on" from Forth.
several people on the call thanked him for changing their lives with his language, for giving them a lifetime of joyful work and a powerful simple way of thinking about computing, to which he responded "I can only hope it was worthwhile"
I'm having a lot of feelings about this. on one hand I have a *very* soft spot in my heart for these aging wizards who insist on doing things their own way. I very much see myself in them, in that insistence, and they are the kind of person I aspire to age into. watching them get thwarted is like watching an aspirational version of my future self get thwarted and it breaks my heart.
the indignity of putting these people through the tedium and stupidity of modern computing is also really jarring. these are people that imagined a different kind of computing, a kind of future that never got built, that got sidelined in favor of advertisements in the start menu, applications with in-app purchases, the global network as a mall, capital over computing.
and they've lived long enough to see it play out. Joe Armstrong talked about wrestling with grunt and gulp from the JavaScript ecosystem in one of his last talks. I've had the pleasure of working with Larry Cuba and most of our difficulties have been wrangling python package management on Windows. and now Chuck Moore gets his life work sniped to death by a random Windows update.
modern computers are a mess of accidental complexity and these are people that represented something different, living long enough to watch something worse become mainstream.
and beyond just the triumph of capital over any alternative, it really breaks my heart that computers are just objectively worse today than they were in the time of Chuck Moore. I try and not be an old man yelling at the cloud about this but we've given up on stability, soundness, maintainability. these are non-goals of modern computing, sacrificed at the altar of shareholder value.
it is wild that an official update of the operating system could break otherwise working code in a way that is impossible to determine even what is happening, let alone what to do to fix it. but this is we've come to expect. computers break all the time, software breaks all the time, stuff crashes, you restart, whatever. and this isn't even factoring in the incoming wave of vibe-coded systems which make no attempt at correctness.
this isn't what computing was, there were attempts -- serious attempts! -- developing theory and practice to develop systems that were stable and correct in the face of usage and updates. we put half a century into that. and now we live in a kind of collective surrender. it's really depressing. as someone who has dedicated a life to computing, it's really fucking depressing.
