Decide for yourself: https://skilldrick.github.io/easyforth/

Using something you enjoy is fine, as long as you don’t forget the person who is going to maintain your code after you move on.

Imagine inheriting a project that was a joy for someone to work on instead of a slog.

Joy is probably an improvement on slog, but one person's joy is another's hell. I've inherited a lot of joyful projects that were an awful fit for continued maintenance because joyful meant using new, unproven, and unstable technologies.

I have experienced many identical situations. Some people just love to tinker and over-engineer for the sake of stretching a muscle. It's unfortunate when that sneaks into a prod system that has to be maintained by others.

Parent developer's Joy is the inheriting developer's Despair. A project is successful when the parent developer is Bored.

Cool post from Raymond as usual!

I’d like to add that the hardware for the SoftCard was designed by Tim Paterson at SCP about the same time he was writing the future MS-DOS

I've never met Raymond but based on his posts, I have a fantasy that Microsoft would make him "Benevolent Dictator For Life" of Windows desktop OS. At this point, it's the only thing that might save Windows 11 as a daily desktop operating system for power users.

Haha, I remember him for “Lindows”. Managed to get quite some press with that smoke and mirrors…

I recently learned of him because of a service that he seems to be affiliated with. This is a service that seems to search for webinars or meetings and surreptitiously records them. It is an interesting concept, but it has definitely baffled some Zoom users. This is a Reddit thread I saw where it seems to be him who is responding to some of the comments: https://old.reddit.com/r/Zoom/comments/1lpvv06/webinartv_ste...

Wonderful article! Programming 68000 assembly is a joy. People are quick to dismiss CISC instruction sets because they mostly encounter x64 with its baggage of legacy, but 68k is something else.

I remember reading Lance Levanthal's 68000 book and doing some toy exercises as my first kind of non-uni assy experience; then when I got to college some IBM 360. When I finally saw x86, omg what a nightmare.

For a moment I hoped Borland’s Object Windows Library got resurrected https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object_Windows_Library

> It's actually, I would say, slightly simpler to learn what the instructions are than 6502 or Z80,

It is far more complicated than 6502 or even Z80. Just compare the Easy6502 with EasyRiscV tutorials if you don’t believe me.

I'm familiar with both those tutorials, and indeed have been programming the 6502 for 45 years (and Z80 for 44).

HOW is RV32I more complicated than 6502 or Z80? I sure can't see it, please explain.

There are more registers, but that's not complicated because they all behave exactly the same as each other (with the sole exception of the Zero register always reading as 0) and every register can be used for any operand of any instruction.

Recession is officially whatever NBER says it is and it doesn’t have a well defined meaning.

Also it’s by design a trailing designation. You will be in (and possibly out) of a recession before NBER declares one, by definition.

That was not the title of the article

The book has a pretty good description of how to escape prison…

French prison, at that.

Might as well go heavy duty and get Papillon.