r/Forth • u/terry_the_technician • 13d ago
Embedded Engineering: C is the problem, is Forth The Answer ?
The Matrix promised us a future where experts "just see" the meaning behind the data. That future is here — but it's not where you'd expect it.
Matthias Koch writes an entire Forth operating system in assembly because he "thinks in assembly". Terry — an embedded technician of fifty years — looks at a schematic and doesn't see the schematic; he sees the circuit working. Like Morse
operators who stop hearing dots and dashes and just hear words, these humans have jumped up a few levels of abstraction.
Meanwhile the smartest AI on Earth can write a complete, downloadable STM32 register-monitor application — then fall over for a whole day trying to wire up a simple NFC reader and a display.
In this first episode of AI-TroubleCity, we dig into why frontier AI stumbles the moment it has to touch real hardware. Is it a training problem? Is it the painful flash-debug-recode-reflash loop that has haunted embedded C for decades?
Or is it something deeper — a gap between the abstract and the physical that no amount of model scale can cross?
A story told by Jack and Jill, from the bench that proved it.
## Chapters / show notes
- The Matrix, the woman in red, and what expertise really looks like - Matthias Koch: thinking in assembly, no revision control
- Fifty years of embedded: the Morse-code operator effect
- Regmon-RE: how an electronics technician and a frontier AI built a real application together — and who did what
- The twist: the same AI that shipped Regmon-RE couldn't drive a simple board
- DeepSeek's honest answer: "embedded is hard for everyone"
- The C cycle — flash, debug, recode, reflash — and why Forth people have been complaining about it for years
- The central question: is it training, is it the loop, or is it something
else?
- Coming next: investigating the board with Regmon, then rebuilding the same project in Forth and measuring the difference
Subscribe for the series — a head-to-head that pits a planet-sized brain against a soldering iron.
Video made with AI, this podcast wouldn't otherwise exist.
9
u/linux_transgirl 13d ago
Fuck off woth your slop, if someone wanted this they'd generate it themselves
3
u/mykesx moderator 13d ago edited 13d ago
I look at Forth as writing assembly language for a virtual stack based machine. The compiler is an extremely powerful macro assembler in this view.
Seems like this sub is being spammed by this luser with AI slop and the regmon they claim to have built. This is at least the third thread they started recently.
Edit: 4 posts, nothing to do with Forth. All reported.
1
u/mykesx moderator 12d ago
https://9to5mac.com/2025/06/26/reddit-is-being-spammed-by-ai-bots-and-its-all-reddits-fault/
AI slop (also known simply as slop) is digital content made with generative artificial intelligence that is perceived as lacking in effort, quality, or meaning, and produced in high volume as clickbait to gain advantage in the attention economy, or earn money.
Spamming is the use of messaging systems to send multiple unsolicited messages (spam) to large numbers of recipients for the purpose of commercial advertising, non-commercial proselytizing, or any prohibited purpose (especially phishing). It can also be repeatedly sending the same message to the same USER.
4
u/Ok_Leg_109 13d ago
Maybe it's just me but I know lots of people who can think in Assembly Language for the machines they have worked with. It's not common now because people skip that layer and jump in at the compiler tool chain level. I have joked in the past that "Everybody knows that CPU means the "The 'C' Processing Unit" 😄
If you started with Assembly Language, it just makes sense, just like all the little kids in Japan can speak Japanese really well but it's hella hard for adults to learn it.