Computers realize the idea of magic behind the world. There are magic languages that make everything possible, the programming languages. In them, slaves can be controlled with spells. In them, for example, things can transform, things are created by words or are destroyed by words. 
 

Yes, initially my only goal was to try and make a “useful” language in as small an implementation as possible. I’ve always been obsessed with small/simple/fast (still am), and for me this was a fun diversion from the relative complexity of the E compiler.

I knew the language had to be based on Forth, as there’s no other language that has such simple parsing (it is mostly just a sequence of operations, little structure) and execution model (each operation simply takes from / adds to the stack).

Amicom of Spreadpoint has been interviewed by Com and Orlando of Brainstorm at the Escpape and Spreadpoint copy party on Oktober 7th. 

When did you join Spreadpoint ? 
-A month ago. 

Your task in Spreadpoint ? 
-Coder, but in Spreadpoint everybody can do what he wants to. 

For how long have you been programming on the Amiga ? 
-For 2 years. 
What computers did you work on before? 
-Spectrum, Sinclair QL. I did some graphic programming with BASIC. 

What did you program on the Amiga? 
-A 3D-Demo (Summer of 88 for TLB), various intros and copiers for cracked games, Powerutility (sold it), a level editor for a shoot'em up, AMICOM-Kickstart (Antivirus, Copier etc.) 

What are you doing at the time ? 
-I'm working on Demo, called ATOM-demo. 
What's this about ? 
-Colored, shaded, permeating(!) 3D-Objects. 

Your future projects ? 
-3D vectorgrafics, 3D editor (ev. sell it), copier with multitasking capility, various utilities. 

What hardware do you have ? 
-An Amiga 1000  (1.5Mb, Harddisk 20 Mega SCSI), And an Amiga 2000 (A2620 Unix card, 68020 processor, 68881 math. coprocessor, 68851 Memory Management Unit, harddisk 80 MB SCSI, Modem 2400 Baud) 
Tell us something about your Master Seka. 
-It's based on the Seka V3.0 by Kefrens/Promax. It has been reassembled  and revised by my collegue Buddha. 
The main advantages are: 
Better editor commands, a finally working optimize function, auto runback, the workspace can be changed without exitting the Seka. 

Is there anything you want to advise to Amiga coders ? 
-Unfortunetly, there are more and more good programs, recently, which run only on one special Amiga. So I advise to try out the programs on different Amigas and to avoid unproper coding (absolute addresses, selfmodifing code, DBF-waiting-loops running to fast on the 68020.) 
And I hate programs, which you only can exit by a reset! 

Thank you for your answers. 

     Translated by The Acc{sed/BRS

cently founded by Eduard Stiefel, where he worked together with Ambros Speiser on developing the first Swiss computer ERMETH, and developed the programming language Superplan (1949–1951), the name being a reference to Rechenplan (English: computation plan), in Konrad Zuse's terminology, designating a single Plankalkül program. He contributed especially in the field of compiler pioneering work and was eventually involved in defining the languages ALGOL 58 and ALGOL 60. He was a member of the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP) IFIP Working Group 2.1 on Algorithmic Languages and Calculi,[1] which specified, maintains, and supports ALGOL 60 and ALGOL 68.[2]

Base for a lot of computers (GUI, Mac, Atari, Amiga, Next  etc) arcades and Arcades! Expensive but with a fantastic assembler-language. 

very important also for the developers of games. it was knowhow. the ground language. 

interesting game in the development line of the text adventures of the 80ies and their language pattern. new possible with modern ai. 

communities (as systems) have their own language, their own values (and thus also their own capitals), their own operations, their own exensions, their own decision extensions.

Coder.
Amicom joined SPREADPOINT in 1989 together with Depeche. He was active as coder of very different things from MMU tools to demos. What he liked best was to explore and develop new programming tricks that could be used in demos and other places.

Data
Born 1968, grown up and living in Switzerland.
Todays occupation: finishing studies (natural science), running an internet company togehter with other ex-amiga freaks.

Work
Demos: Lissa, Platin3D, Small.
Intros: Giana Sisters (trained by Depeche), Amegas (trained by Depeche).
Utilities: Blitter-Copy, List Manager, MMU expert, AFS File Scrambler, SPlay soundtracker player.
Other stuff: Atom Demo (unfinished), Platon's Polyhedra (unfinished), revival of HQC demos, GigaMem (a virtual memory extension to AmigaDOS), some work in TypeSmith (a outline font editor).

Music
Depeche Mode, Kraftwerk, Simple Minds, Billy Idol, Pink Floyd, Pet Shop Boys, OMD, ...

{ comment }

64o: { stor 64 to o}
[15][o;1 o:o;,]# { while 15 do  read o add 1 and store o read o print  end  }

 

// store 10o:

// load o;

// print ,

// while [ COND ][ ARGUMENTS  ] #

 

Demo coder, known for cool demos and trainers.
Depeche jonied Spreadponit in 1989. He mysteriously left SP in 1990 and broke up alomst all contact. He then went over to DefJam but not very much later stopped his Amiga activity. Depeche was so fond of language games that he once bought a Langenscheid's dictionary of slang-English!

Data 
Born 1972, grown up and living in Switzerland
Todays occupation: finishing studies (comp. sci)

Work
Demos: Wooow, Scrapheap, Empire, Power!, HI5 and more
Trainers: a whole lot...
Sound: some crazy mixes
Tools: a disk copier in a bootblock, TLB-Utilitydisk, more

Hobbies
old days: being creative, being cool, speaking cool, cool places, cool clothes, cool people, arcade games, pinball machines
today: unknown.

Music
DM, Art of Noise, Erasure, Pet Shop Boys, Yello, LL cool J, Derek B, De la soul, ...

Mostly by announcing it on usenet. That had a tight-knit community of Amiga programmers that was easy to reach. Then on Fish disks and Aminet as well. At some point, print magazines started to cover it with courses etc, and I got invited to speak at conferences about it.

It got fairly popular, to the point where at some point a popularity poll was held somewhere on the internets, and E came in second after C/C , but before Pascal and Basic. Probably a biased sample, but still :)

To keep it simple to parse, I knew that each operation had to be a single character. Then it dawned on me just how unreadable this language would become, and it was at that point that I thought it would be fun to use more obscure symbols to make it crazy looking on purpose. The idea that you could have a collection of random-looking symbols, and that it would actually be useful, and implemented using such a small compiler got me excited :)

Back then yes. Me and Chris Pressey would email a lot, with him showing me his latest creations (I mostly went back to “serious” language design after FALSE :). There was also quite a bit of community around FALSE, with people making implementations in other languages/systems, or make dialects etc. There was actually quite a few people that made “useful” programs in FALSE

Ivan Sutherland’s seminal Sketchpad application was an early inspiration for OOP. It was created between 1961 and 1962 and published in his Sketchpad Thesis in 1963. The objects were data structures representing graphical images displayed on an oscilloscope screen, and featured inheritance via dynamic delegates, which Ivan Sutherland called “masters” in his thesis. Any object could become a “master”, and additional instances of the objects were called “occurrences”.

Coding gives you power.
Everybody can have its own slave (LCP)!

Basic for creating games. 

The after mainframe-area (based on c and co) was driven by coding near the hardware to get more speed. espacially in games. So Assembler was important. 

this computers came with an operating system, gui-based and mouse. basic was a prg to use (not anymore line based). there were some new styles of basics coming up like gfa-basic, omikron-basic (atari st). 

and the most games were coded in assembler (68000 was a god processor for assembler). so you had to buy assembler, which was not included. 

There are different types of hacker:

>> homecomputers .. 

Very emblematic use of technical possibilities