last week, someone asked about why permacomputing seemed to favor Forth – and I
don’t think it has to be Forth, but Forth fits a lot of the constraints that
programming languages that permacomputing would be interested in would have to
take into consideration
don’t require a lot of resources (power, memory, or storage)
can be bootstrapped relatively easily : sectorForth, milliForth, sectorLisp,
uLisp, Uxn
has enough existing code (and community) to learn from (and isn’t just some
grad project that was abandoned after graduation)
but also doesn’t have so much code that it’s now synonymous with
lake-burning scrapers fouling the waters
can be run in constrained environments : commodity microcontrollers,
8-bit processors
can be compiled in those same constrained environments (back to being able
to bootstrap it rather than needing a server farm to cross compile it)
