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Zig is hard but worth it
"I learned Zig in a weekend! …Six hours! …6µs!" say the blissful lizards. Followed by something to the effect of, "It’s easy to pick up because the syntax is so simple."
Dave Gauer
Now for the chronology. This is the main "blog-like" part of the site. There are other parts of the site that contain ongoing web logs as I add to them. So this isn’t everything. Explore, have fun, and thanks for visiting!
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Forth: The programming language that writes itself
An exploration of the evolution and meaning of the Forth programming language and its context in history.
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Forth: The programming language that writes itself
A talk by Dave Gauer , 2023. Made with minslides , which I made for this talk . Use the J and K keys to go forward and backward. You can also just scroll down like a regular web page. Toggle notes/annotations with the N key.
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Small Programs and Languages
My Implementing a Forth article got some great feedback, particularly around the subject of tiny Forth implementations. (And it was an excuse to list some of the tiniest Forths I’ve seen.)
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I learned Snobol and then wrote a toy Forth
This page is a mini-site for my Snobol excursion with links to separate pages for my:
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Implementing a Forth
(Image of "Four-Armed Chuck" programming a PDP-11 is from my giant write-up of Forth .)
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i386 Assembly Language trick for storing data in .text
Don’t want a big old bloated multi-kilobyte executable with a data segment, but you do need to store some data?
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Assembly Nights
Over the last three months, I’ve developed an unusual little nighttime routine: after reading bedtime stories to the kids, I hop into bed and instead of reaching for a fiction book, I’m turning on my 14-year old Asus eeePC 701 (wikipedia.org) miniature laptop and writing x86 assembly language. This is turning out to…
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Naur's "Programming as Theory Building" and LLMs replacing human programmers
In this essay, I will perform the logical fallacy of argument from authority (wikipedia.org) to attack the notion that large language model (LLM)-based generative "AI" systems are capable of doing the work of human programmers.