The FORTH liberation

Bought my self two Arduinos (UNO and Mega) because, you know, you need to work with sensors and embedded little thingies. Also, you have to be able to fully grok a circuit, to understand the architecture, the assembly language, and so forth (pun intended). I bought a book about FORTH on the ATmega328P chipset, i.e., the heart of Arduino, by Dr. C.H. Ting, of eForth fame. It blew my mind. You wipe out the original bootloader and load FORTH on it. From that point on, you have full control, even stuff that the Arduino C compiler won't allow you to do. I'll just leave this quote here: "In explaining how this system is constructed, every step in the way, I hope to lay to rest these myths that computers are complicated, programming languages are complicated, and operating systems are complicated. All these things can be very simple, and can be understood by ordinary people and ordinary engineers. If you understand this 328eForth system completely, the understanding can be carried over to any computer and microcontrollers. People using computers are trained to be slaves. You are taught to push certain buttons, and you are taught to push certain keys. Then, you get employed to push buttons and keys to work as slaves. Computers, programming languages, and operating systems are made complicated to enslave people." -- C.H. Ting.