To add to your comment, the intro immediately reminded me that Forth was born even earlier than 1975, to solve the same punch card problem:
"The programming environment in the 50s was more severe than today. My source code filled 2 trays with punch cards. They had to be carried about to be put through machines, mostly by me [Chuck Moore, the inventor of Forth]. Compile took 30 minutes (just like C) but limited computer time meant one run per day, except maybe 3rd shift.
So I wrote this simple interpreter to read input cards and control the program. It also directed calculations. The five orbital elements each had an empirical equation to account for atmospheric drag and the non-spherical Earth. Thus I could compose different equations for the several satellites without re-compiling." [1]
I therefore take issue with the statement in TFA:
"This notion of reducing accidental complexity to the bare minimum is the key to a lot of our problems, and there is no greater champion of this principle than Niklaus Wirth."
As far as "bare minimum" goes, the true champion is Chuck Moore, no question asked. He eventually embedded the essence of his language in 144-cores chips [2]. The thing was designed by a CAD program he made with his language, too. This is actually the last chip of a series of "Forth chips" that did better than "Lisp machines" or the various similar "<language> chip", because a derivative of one of his designs, the RTX2010, has visited a comet not long ago.
"The programming environment in the 50s was more severe than today. My source code filled 2 trays with punch cards. They had to be carried about to be put through machines, mostly by me [Chuck Moore, the inventor of Forth]. Compile took 30 minutes (just like C) but limited computer time meant one run per day, except maybe 3rd shift.
So I wrote this simple interpreter to read input cards and control the program. It also directed calculations. The five orbital elements each had an empirical equation to account for atmospheric drag and the non-spherical Earth. Thus I could compose different equations for the several satellites without re-compiling." [1]
I therefore take issue with the statement in TFA:
"This notion of reducing accidental complexity to the bare minimum is the key to a lot of our problems, and there is no greater champion of this principle than Niklaus Wirth."
As far as "bare minimum" goes, the true champion is Chuck Moore, no question asked. He eventually embedded the essence of his language in 144-cores chips [2]. The thing was designed by a CAD program he made with his language, too. This is actually the last chip of a series of "Forth chips" that did better than "Lisp machines" or the various similar "<language> chip", because a derivative of one of his designs, the RTX2010, has visited a comet not long ago.
[1] https://colorforth.github.io/HOPL.html [2] http://www.greenarraychips.com/index.html [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RTX2010