Chuck Moore is the creator of the FORTH programming language.
He was born in 1938 in McKeesport, Pennsylvania, (near Pittsburgh)
and grew up in Flint, Michigan. (He is still living as of this writing in
2002.) He was one of the founding members of Forth, Inc., a
corporation that writes FORTH compilers and custom applications, often
in the embedded space. One of their foremost customers is FedEx;
their bar-code scanner devices are programmed in FORTH.
He is best-known outside the FORTH community for his eccentric choices
of input devices, including a keyboard with only 5 keys. However,
within that community, he is well-known not only as the creator of the
language, but as an innovator who constantly changes his personal
version of the language to be ever smaller and tighter-focused.
He is also well-known within that community for a unique approach to
programming; the mainstream programming community promotes writing the
most general program possible to solve a task and adding hooks to
one's program for easier extension in the future. Chuck Moore says
that a program should never have unnecessary code, and that the
programming mainstream of today has ten times the bloat necessary to
solve its tasks.
His webpage is available at http://www.colorForth.com,
named for his latest dialect of FORTH, and many of his writings are
available at Jeff Fox's homepage,
http://www.UltraTechnology.com.