Growing up in the golden age of home computers caused me to get infected with a virus for which I didn’t find a cure yet, and I’m not sure if I actually want to get cured. The virus causes me to be spend considerable amounts of time fiddling with smallish computer systems with the goal to understand every byte and component, and maybe even create something useful out of them. That last part is optional though, the journey is the reward :)
The most recent incident involves the ever giving Forth, and an underused Arduino Uno. Forth on a Harvard architecture is challenging exercise, but the AVR design has a couple of nice touches which makes this quite interesting. It also seems that the combination of CoreForth-0 and Janus is actually quite capable for bootstrap new systems. Meta-compilation with Forth is turtles all the way down, so once you have a working setup, it’s better to not think too much about it and just use it.
Of course the question is why, and right now the only answer I have is: Because I can :)