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Comment count is 21
Scrotum H. Vainglorious - 2015-08-24

Shame about that whole schizophrenia thing.


garcet71283 - 2015-08-24

Really not regretting my decision to drop software engineering as a major right now.


Meerkat - 2015-08-24

It's fine to engineer software as a living, but in your spare time you should really be watching Babylon 5 or whacking off to photos of Tera Patrick or whatever.


Oscar Wildcat - 2015-08-24

This is basically how I imagine God to be, creating and running the universe using tools such as this. Seriously.


fluffy - 2015-08-24

Of course you can do this exact same thing in Python on any OS, but Python is the devil's language because snakes and garden of eden and whatever

Of course you can also do this exact same thing in Tcl on any OS

and this is precisely how the standard shell in Linux works, too

Anyway I always love listening these videos to see how Terry Davis' mind works (or fails to) but I can't watch the video without getting a giant headache with all the constant spinny stuff and weird aleatoric autocomplete nonsense.


Meerkat - 2015-08-24

I keep meaning to learn Python, I hear it is both really useful and has a lot of syntactical integrity if that's the phrase I'm looking for.

Also, indenting.


Mr. Purple Cat Esq. - 2015-08-24

Python is the devil's language because whitespace matters in it!!!
Normally *Invisible* characters are really important to your code!!!!!!
Apart from that its lovely, but that is a deal breaker for me.

I find myself agreeing with this guy on a lot of points (in some of his other random videos), unix *was* designed for mainframes, Linux is really popular on servers nowadays and it is designed from the ground up with things like security, networking, multi-users, in mind, things that I dont give a shit about. I like the idea of an OS to turn a modern pc into a C64 like machine, designed to go as fast as possible, squeeze as much performance out of the hardware as it can and play games and do multimedia stuff on.
The best solution for that atm is Windows and its not a very good one, theres totally a gap for an OS like that.

I actually like the UI of temple too, seems like a cool mix of good ideas from PARC and terminal, like with clickable links in the terminal.


Bort - 2015-08-24

That whitespace thing is a dealbreaker for me too. I honestly wonder what sort of idiot would consider that a feature, and not a bug, to put in the language they were developing.


Mr. Purple Cat Esq. - 2015-08-24

@Bort Its really impractical but I can at least see where the developer was coming from (I think). Whitespace and control characters are characters in you code that often do nothing, he made the code purer by replacing a functional element (brackets) with one that was vestigal (whitespace)

Though I love curly brackets! They make the code so clear visually. Also I particularly like how in C++ you can put any arbitrary bit of code in braces and any variables declared in them will not be accessible outside them.


Potrod - 2015-08-24

You don't care about security..?


fluffy - 2015-08-24

I used to be in the same camp - "Python seems great but the whitespace is a dealbreaker." And I didn't believe any of the people who told me, "It's really not that big a deal and you learn to appreciate it."

It's really not that big a deal and you learn to appreciate it.

The only places where the whitespace is a problem are:

1) you're using a shitty text editor (solution: use a better text editor)
2) you're trying to copy-paste code into a forum that doesn't preserve whitespace (solution: use pastebin)

I mean there's plenty of other problems with Python (most of which are fixed in Python 3, but everyone's still using 2.x for various reasons) but they're of the fiddly sort that all languages have. On the whole it's a great language, and to make it even better, it's got a wonderful developer community where people are actually helpful, thoughtful, and constructive.

I'm still learning Python and every time I've had a question about something basic I just ask on Twitter or Stack Overflow and always get a great, straightforward, clear-as-day answer that also teaches me more about the language in ways that make sense and are consistent. As opposed to any other language where asking questions usually gets a "fucking Google it" or a link to a vaguely-related section of the inscrutable language spec. Something about Python just makes people *friendlier*, somehow, and that's worth a lot to me.


fluffy - 2015-08-24

Also Linux wasn't "designed for mainframes." Even UNIX wasn't designed for mainframes, for that matter - it was designed for the PDP-11, which was considered a small computer for the time. It was intended to be a small, nimble OS for accessible computers.

Also by getting to the bare metal you're actually giving up a lot of performance and capabilities - you don't get a GPU, for example, and some of Terry's design decisions severely hamper what you can do with multiple CPU cores; for example, he thinks that pipes are evil and over-complicated, and his solution is that the process should put its complete output into a big buffer that's then available to the receiver. Which means you can't have multiple CPUs working on different parts of a complex pipeline, and you're constrained in memory, and you can't do anything that has an unbounded amount of work that's handled progressively. Pipes buy you a LOT, for free, and he's thrown them out for the sake of being "like a Commodore 64."

Even when it was called LoseThOS I had plenty of issues with his design, as well; the reason his UI is so fucking hyperactive is because he wants to make it very, very clear that every single screen update involves the whole screen being painted. You waste a LOT of time doing that, especially when you have a synchronous dependency between the UI and the underlying code - which TempleOS definitely does. And this ends up *introducing* lag, not eliminating it. (This is pretty much the biggest performance issue you have to deal with when writing web apps in JavaScript, for that matter, and the solutions to those problems in JS are even worse than anything that you avoid by doing a single-issue synchronous API.)


Oscar Wildcat - 2015-08-24

Why Fluffy, you're obviously under the influence of that bad old snake, all wound around you apple computer. "God made so many mistakes: you can do better!" the old serpent whispers in between the white spaces of your code. And another soul is lost... Jehovah, press cntrl-alt-del already!


Bort - 2015-08-25

"The only places where the whitespace is a problem are:

1) you're using a shitty text editor (solution: use a better text editor)
2) you're trying to copy-paste code into a forum that doesn't preserve whitespace (solution: use pastebin)"

3) You make a mistake because you're only human.

Yes, it's possible to make mistakes with curly brackets, but then the white space is often a clue to help you figure out where you went wrong. You lose that double-check with Python.


fluffy - 2015-08-25

Bort: I'd expected that to be a problem, but I've found that I've not been making any logic mistakes like that. Maybe I will at some point, but it just hasn't been an issue for me so far.

When I write C++ or Java or whatever I'm constantly having my code editor re-indent shit all the time. And any logic flow errors I make are due to putting the logic in the wrong branch or inside/outside curlybraces that I didn't mean to. So I'm finding Python to be absolutely no different for any of that.

All I'm saying is, don't let theoreticals about what MIGHT go wrong with a language prevent you from trying one out.


hammsangwich - 2015-08-24

Jesus christ, this guy can't even touch type. In the video on his website, he has a webcam view and he looks at the keys. You are literally wasting years of your life chicken pecking if you spend this much time on the keyboard.


StanleyPain - 2015-08-24

I think this guy has much bigger problems.


John Holmes Motherfucker - 2015-08-25

Clearly I'm not the target audience for this. The only programming I know how to do is simple lists of commands made executable as shell scripts for BASH. I'm just wondering if there's any point in me learning about TempleOS, which I've never heard of.

Personally, I'm waiting for Richard Stallman to finally perfect the Hurd kernel he's been working on since the eighties. He's still on it, according to a tweet from a couple years ago. When he finally does it, what will that mean? I don't know, I suppose it will be a step toward the truly free OS of his dreams.


fluffy - 2015-08-25

TempleOS is less a useful operating system and more a study in neurological malfunction.

Basically, Terry A. Davis started out writing his own OS with the idea of bringing back the ideals of the Commodore 64, as he was beginning to develop schizophrenia. Fast forward a few years and he decided that the voices in his head were God telling him what to build, and his computer is now a temple to God.

I am very much glossing over things. His website (http://templeos.org) has a lot more information, and some of the rants are fascinating, although sad. http://www.templeos.org/Wb/Doc/Demands.html is a pretty good starting point.


fluffy - 2015-08-25

Oh also http://www.templeos.org/Wb/Home/Wb2/History.html


John Holmes Motherfucker - 2015-08-25

I miss my Commodore 64. Speedscript was the best word processor I ever used. I wrote a whole novel with it. Not a good one, though.


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