» How did you spread the word about the language (if you did), and how widely was it used?
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 :)
Hah, I might not be the best to explain Amiga history, but I’ll do my best :) Fish disks were the main way to distribute public domain, open source, shareware etc. before the internet was wide-spread. People would send Fred Fish software, and he’d compile them into individual disks that people would copy. Magazines would have lots of companies that would allow you to order copies of these disks etc. He ended up creating over a 1000 disks this way. When cd-roms became a thing, you could order the whole collection on those. Those were strange times :)
Aminet was the most famous ftp-archive for amiga software. It was run by the same guy that made Brainfuck, Urban Müller. Rather than chronologically like fish disks, it was organized by topic, with readme’s for every file. You could upload to a staging area, and he’d put them in place. Much like fish disks, companies would print cd-roms with the latest from aminet for those not hooked up to the internets (or on 56k modems, which was most people).
Aminet was the most famous ftp-archive for amiga software. It was run by the same guy that made Brainfuck, Urban Müller. Rather than chronologically like fish disks, it was organized by topic, with readme’s for every file. You could upload to a staging area, and he’d put them in place. Much like fish disks, companies would print cd-roms with the latest from aminet for those not hooked up to the internets (or on 56k modems, which was most people).
» Do you remember your intentions when you set out to design FALSE?
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).
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 :)
» FALSE influenced early esolangs like brainfuck and Befunge, which went on to inspire more, setting off the esolang movement. Did you have much interaction with esolangers (either during the Amiga era – not that they were called esolangers then – or more recently)?
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
Hah, I might not be the best to explain Amiga history, but I’ll do my best :) Fish disks were the main way to distribute public domain, open source, shareware etc. before the internet was wide-spread. People would send Fred Fish software, and he’d compile them into individual disks that people would copy. Magazines would have lots of companies that would allow you to order copies of these disks etc. He ended up creating over a 1000 disks this way. When cd-roms became a thing, you could order the whole collection on those. Those were strange times :)
Aminet was the most famous ftp-archive for amiga software. It was run by the same guy that made Brainfuck, Urban Müller. Rather than chronologically like fish disks, it was organized by topic, with readme’s for every file. You could upload to a staging area, and he’d put them in place. Much like fish disks, companies would print cd-roms with the latest from aminet for those not hooked up to the internets (or on 56k modems, which was most people).
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aminet.net
aminnet
» For those of us who were not part of Amiga culture, could you tell us what Aminet is / was? How did one get projects onto Fish Disks, what kind of software would you find on one, etc?
False (Esoteric Programming Language) > Important communication media - FALSE - Brainfuck etc
» For those of us who were not part of Amiga culture, could you tell us what Aminet is / was? How did one get projects onto Fish Disks, what kind of software would you find on one, etc?
Interview with Wouter van Oortmerssen (Inventor: Amiga E & FALSE )
aminet.net
aminnet
» For those of us who were not part of Amiga culture, could you tell us what Aminet is / was? How did one get projects onto Fish Disks, what kind of software would you find on one, etc?
False (Esoteric Programming Language) > Important communication media - FALSE - Brainfuck etc
Fish disk
Aminet was the most famous ftp-archive for amiga software.
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Back then yes. Me and Chris Pressey would email a lot, with him showing me his latest creations (I
Müller, Urban
» For those of us who were not part of Amiga culture, could you tell us what Aminet is / was? How did one get projects onto Fish Disks, what kind of software would you find on one, etc?
Interview with Wouter van Oortmerssen (Inventor: Amiga E & FALSE )