Thursday 18 November 2010

words words words

I recall reading about a girl who was blind and deaf so she never knew language. I think it was Helen Keller but I am not certain. Someone taught her language through some means probably Braille and taught her how to write. Years later she wrote that the most marvelous thing about language was the way everything has a name - every object, every action, every description and that these words are pieced together to make concepts. You might suppose there would have been other ways for language to develop. Maybe we would have ended up with long strings of numbers or letters to express a single concept, kind of like the Welsh village name Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch which has a meaning I won't bother with here.
RoboForth is like natural language. Simple easy words you just string together to make a robot concept, like TELL SHOULDER 1000 STEPS. No curly brackets, no dummy arguments in parentheses, just words.
OK, I know some Forth words have been short-formed to single characters but they are still words, just one character long.

Friday 12 November 2010

TRUST in software.

TCG defines the notion of trust as “the expectation that a device will behave in a particular manner for the specific purpose”. For example, it is the expectation that our kitchen refrigerator will cool its contents to the level specified by its thermostat, no more (interfering with the contents placed within, spying on users opening the door, borrowing electricity to transmit wireless messages) and no less (failing to cool during early morning hours, changing the thermostat settings unpredictably)

When a user contacts me with a software problem it's amazing how often they seem to blame the software. For example "CAN'T REACH" must be some sort of bug. The fact that the robot can't actually reach because of the coordinates specified somehow is not trusted. So many users have been acclimatized to Windows applications that fall over with great regularity that they expect rock solid embedded software like RoboForth to do the same.