Forth was never going to be the next Java or Rust, but in its own little niche, it's fantastic. ANS Forth isn't getting any new features anytime soon, but meanwhile forth spawned a whole family of interesting languages like Joy, Factor, and ColorForth. Besides, evolution is overrated: tardigrades are still doing fine :)
The evolution of tardigrades as super fascinating: https://eartharchives.org/articles/tardigrade-genome-reveals...
Ugh, "computers". I'm not even a stickler for terminology, but the whole "144 computers" thing somehow rubs me the wrong way, like it's some Best Buy salesdroid telling me that a quad-core means having four computers in one box.
So it's not like a computer with 144 1-core CPU:s sharing RAM and ports, or a CPU with 144 cores, it's something weirder and more reminiscent of a network of small computers.
And that’s not a bad pitch! Modern silicon certainly doesn’t like to be bent into a (single-layer) FPGA shape—the result is comparatively slow, expensive, and power-hungry—but accomodates specialized functional blocks very well, so a matrix of baby processors with accompanying memory sounds genuinely like a good idea for an FPGA-like application.
Unfortunately, the GA144 is the only game in town here, and at $500 per dev kit they sure aren’t interested in hobbyists. So I’m left to admire it from a distance. (And $20 per chip is not a bad price considering the competition—as I said, FPGAs are expensive—but it still falls into the expensive-chip bucket. Not a lot of places are going to build a design around a unique expensive chip from an obscure source.)
I've never implemented a gaussian blur on bitmaps with a FPGA, maybe it is simpler somehow than this example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iwM0qfQqmdE
They honestly do sound quite interesting, and if I could fork myself off a few times to look at fun & interesting things, this GreenArray stuff would be in the list ;)