A Constructive Look at TempleOS

http://www.codersnotes.com/notes/a-constructive-look-at-templeos

by kayamon • 11 years ago

463 165 11 years ago

VieElm• 11 years ago

Someone should start a Kickstarter for a professionally done documentary of Terry Davis and TempleOS. He's such an interesting person. I'd watch it. It would probably be an amazing documentary if done well and assuming Terry Davis would be OK with it.

rpcope12• 11 years ago

Yeah, it's not every day you see someone with the persistence to roll their own OS like that, and really he has a lot of neat ideas there; guy seems like quite a character, I'm sure there's probably something for all of us to take away, and I'd sure watch it too. It would be really interesting to see the world, for a moment, through his eyes.

getsat2• 11 years ago

I'd love to see a VICE-style documentary which interviews him and really dives into his story.

houli• 11 years ago

For now this VICE article will probably have to do http://motherboard.vice.com/read/gods-lonely-programmer

duskwuff2• 11 years ago

I'd be concerned that the increased attention from a documentary would unhinge him further.

aaronem6• 11 years ago

Schizophrenia is an organic disorder, not a neurosis; aside from that, given the pretty plain fact that Mr. Davis isn't equipped to make his own way in the world, presumably whoever looks after him would intervene to prevent a documentarist's efforts from flustering him too badly.

frou_dh2• 11 years ago

There's a guy known as Ulillillia who has a somewhat similar long term obsessive project (a game, Platform Masters). There was a documentary shot about him that unfortunately seemed to go off the rails in post-production and wasn't released.

synchronise• 11 years ago

Do you have any links with related information to this?

rectangletangle2• 11 years ago

I'm sure if someone like Werner Herzog covered it, it'd be fascinating to watch. There's already hours of source material on YouTube.

Maken• 11 years ago

It sounds like a security nightmare and I'm not sure about how efficient it can be for not user oriented tasks. But the ubiquity of the system is like what XML pretended to be but never was.

jfb• 11 years ago

It's only a security nightmare if the threat model assumes hostile user access and a passive main user, which, as it's not multiuser, and most definitely not a consumer OS, doesn't seem too bad to me.

rpcope12• 11 years ago

If it doesn't have networking (which it doesn't) one would imagine the security attack surface is significantly reduced, and pretty much (outside of insane NSA style radio-transmitter-in-your-cable style attacks) requires physical access, at which point many (most?) machines are sort of hosed anyways, unless you've got things like SED/FIPS, etc.

MichaelGG3• 11 years ago

What stops someone from creating files that exploit memory safety or other security issues, then sending them to a TempleOS user? Sure, they have to load the file into the system, but if they're using the OS it'd be safe to assume there's a way to do this.

igravious4• 11 years ago

Read the article :) Not multi-user. No networking.

TerryADavis• 11 years ago

It is multiprocessing, but not fair sharing. I like to call it single-process multiple thread. There is no difference between "task", "Process" or "thread". It is single address map. Paging in not used, basically.

igravious4• 11 years ago

Hi Terry,

I can't reply to you directly. I didn't mean to imply that TempleOS is not multiprocessing. From what I gather there is only one user (with multiple processes) and that user owns all the files, hence no file permissions that say "this file belongs to user X" and "this file belongs to user Y", only user X can read/write/execute X's files, and the same for user Y. The author of the article linked to here states that TempleOS is a single user (but multiprocess!) system.

I wonder why you haven't implemented threads? Not enough of a benefit in your opinion? Aren't threads supported by modern CPUs. Don't they allow faster context switching than switching context for processes? Though I guess Erlang disagrees!

chomp• 11 years ago

Terry,

You are currently shadow banned.

yoklov• 11 years ago

Wow, theres actually a lot of cool stuff in that. HolyC[0] also has some very nice features and is much more practical than I had previously thought, although I'm not sure I could last for long with it -- a lack of type checking is somewhat brutal.

[0] http://www.templeos.org/Wb/Doc/HolyC.html

imglorp• 11 years ago

It reminds me of the Turbo family of IDE's from a past age: small, fast, integrated.

jd3• 11 years ago

If GNU is the cathedral, and Linux is the bazaar, perhaps there is a place for the temple somewhere too.

cute

S4M• 11 years ago

I like the idea of the shell being an HolyC interpreter. Do we have some analogs with the mainstream languages - I know I could fire up, say, the Python REPL and use it as my shell but that wouldn't be convenient to manipulate files.

igravious4• 11 years ago

It'd be interesting to think about this from the inside out rather than the outside in as is normally done.

So imagine if you wanted to fire up a Python REPL and use it as your shell. What the shell essentially does is treat bare words as external command/executable invocations. Every dynamic language treats bare words as internal function/method invocations. That would mean that any executable looked up in $PATH (a global variable that holds a list of directories) would supersede any internal method in that scope! Is this workable? Why not try it and see? Also if you created a Shell library for Python (in C ;-)) then it could be used by Ruby and Perl and Node (or whatever they're calling it nowadays) and ...

It is interesting to imagine not having to context switch to shell-speak to interact with your machine. If you are a Pythonista just speak Python, a Rubyist the same ...

The article proves your point, even Linux with its openness is still very much tied to years of tradition.

And what if the shell output wasn't line-oriented but a live hypertext doc, say HTML5?

reagency• 11 years ago

Take a look at the "sh" module for python, and JuPyTer/iPython for the UI.

vidarh4• 11 years ago

I was about to suggest you could do this easily in Ruby, but it turns out that getting a catch-all method_missing at the top level to work is quite annoying - too many things in both Irb and Pry (the two main Ruby REPLs) seem to rely on trying method calls and catching the exceptions in ways that broke horribly with my most naive attempts.

But something like this works of-sorts in Ruby:

    module Sh
      def method_missing sym, *args
         bin = ENV["PATH"].split(":").collect do |path|
           full = File.join(path,sym.to_s)
           File.exists?(full) ? full : nil
         end.compact[0] rescue nil

         if !bin
           raise NameError.new(sym.to_s)
         else
           bin = system(bin,*args.collect{|a| a.to_s})
         end
       end
    end

    self.extend Sh

Pry can't handle it very well, probably as it relies extensively on method_missing "magic" itself, but Irb seems do do fine with it.

I'm sure there are ways to do the above in much cleaner ways, and even in Ruby syntax still gets in the way. E.g. you need to do 'ps :aux' or 'ps "aux"' instead of "ps aux" or the options will get interpreted as a method (though you could conceivably try to handle that by capturing NameError exceptions and applying really horribly nasty hacks, there would be a special place in hell for you if you were to do that; even the above is likely to break all kinds of stuff).

And what if the shell output wasn't line-oriented but a live hypertext doc, say HTML5?

There have been all kinds of attempts at that, notably XmlTerm from Mozilla ca. 2000 [1]. It turns out to be a hard problem to get it right enough to make people use it. Basically to get that working at all I suspect you need to start with a good terminal emulator + a good shell, and make small enhancements rather than go the other way which most of these kind of projects have done.

[1] http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2000/06/07/xmlterm/index.html

kybernetikos• 11 years ago

I made some javascript that used getter methods on the global object to allow you to write things like

ls

It worked pretty well, I even added getters for directories, and they had getters for their subdirectories, etc.

At the end of the day though, having to wrap all arguments in () is a bit annoying.

frou_dh2• 11 years ago

I think even in HolyC you'll be fully quoting all paths. With general purpose languages, they're going to need either a recognised-shorthand-expanding preprocessor, or unfettered "reader" macros to be able approach Bourne shell style unadorned text that does process and file wrangling.

kayamon4• 11 years ago

Presumably something more in the spirit of REBOL would be a good fit?

DubiousPusher• 11 years ago

I think that's something every programmer dreams of sooner or later. It seems like anything I've worked on that's larger than a utility script eventually results in fudging around with multiple tools trying to get them to cooperate.

And every time, I'm like "I've got some fing code and they've given me some fing code and all I want is for them to run together."

Powershell can call code in .Net assemblies and I imagine there's a way to pass C# or some other .Net code in but it probably requires a fat command.

The true beauty here, I think isn't just the way the Command Line acts as an interpreter but that all the code on the system is exposed at all times through a simple, common interface.

thaumaturgy• 11 years ago

Right? Imagine if you wanted to, I dunno, render HTML in a window in your application for some reason, and you could just easily pull up the running copy of Firefox on your system and call one of its functions, in real time, in your application. Done, now you've got an HTML renderer in your software.

corysama• 11 years ago

Cling is a repl for C++ that jits through LLVM/Clang

https://root.cern.ch/drupal/content/cling

ultimape• 11 years ago

The C shell comes close: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C_shell

For a while I was running Perl as my shell, it bakes in most common unix commands as top level functions and its easy to call ones that aren't built in using system calls. Perl is pretty nice for file manipulations out of the box if you know what you are doing.

LukeShu• 11 years ago

The C shell does not come close. It's just a shell with a C-ish syntax. Fundamentally different than having a C compiler (or interpreter) as your shell

chinpokomon• 11 years ago

I actually pitched that idea to Rob Pike regarding a future for Go. I think that having an environment shell like that, baked into ChromeOS, would both promote the OS and the language. He didn't seem all that impressed, but TempleOS is very close to what I had in mind.

zefei• 11 years ago

Every time I read something about TempleOS, I was amazed by its concepts and Terry's dedication. I wonder if one day we could see something like "doom source code review" on TempleOS.

andrewrice• 11 years ago

Check out his series of videos, "TempleOS: 5-Minute Random Code Walk-Thru": https://www.google.com/search?q=TempleOS+5-minute+random&tbm...

Pengwin• 11 years ago

I really like watching the code reviews Terry has put on youtube. Watching him use his own creation to navigate, test and explain his own creation is very interesting.

duskwuff2• 11 years ago

I understand he has an interesting technique for putting together those code reviews, too: he uses a random number generator to randomly pick a piece of the code, then starts walking through whatever it chooses.

yen223• 11 years ago

I have to admit - HolyC is a clever name http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holy_See.

zymhan• 11 years ago

I realized that the other day when I was reading about TempleOS and laughed at how puntastic it was.

alganet• 11 years ago

It is very interesting to see some comparisons you did. You mentioned Oberon[1], which has an explicit reference to Doug Engelbart. Seeing some TempleOS highlights reminds me a lot of those ideas, including LightTable[2].

[1] http://ignorethecode.net/blog/2009/04/22/oberon/ [2]: http://lighttable.com/

fierycatnet2• 11 years ago

That's nice. Glad to see it on here. I remember this guy and his OS back when people on Reddit were mean to him because he has a mental disorder. His dedication to this project is admirable.

rev_bird• 11 years ago

To be fair, I'm not sure it was simply because he had a mental disorder -- Davis has gotten very combative (or at least ended productive conversations with vulgar non-arguments) on many occasions. Yes, it's probably almost exclusively because of his condition(s?), but it wasn't just "Hey look a guy with a weird brain! HA!"

danellis6• 11 years ago

No, people are not mean to him because he has a mental disorder. People are mean to him because he posts things like this:

A nigger respects complicated programs. The more complicated the more the little niggers respect it. Ask a nigger to design a operating system task scheduler! It's hilarious watching a nigger make priority schedulers. I make my programs simple. I have an electrical engineering degree. I am a master of differential equations. Physics>Engineer>Computer Science> Psychology. The nigger standard model is 20 pages instead of two and it's really really complicated. When a computer scientist builds something he says, "What all features might we possibly need?" When I design I make it as simple as possible. Hello world joke: http://www.infiltec.com/j-h-wrld.htm Look at what the nigger did to graphic files formats: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BMP_file_format Sound file formats: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WAV Any nigger can make it complicated. A nigger makes it as complicated as possible. I am a genius. I make it simple.

aaronem6• 11 years ago

And you think he posts things like that because he's sane?

MichaelGG3• 11 years ago

What's your point? Just reading the WP entry on WAV seems to back him up; it wouldn't be too hard to beat it if you just want a simple PCM format.

As for the racial slurs, they obviously are not racial in this context.

Otherwise, perhaps he's a bit immodest or incorrect. OTOH, he's brighter than most so...

fierycatnet2• 11 years ago

That account was made 5 months ago. I remember this guy from at least 2 years ago when his project got attention on Reddit. Is it really him with that 5 month old account?

In any case, I don't know much about the guy. I just remember his posts being a little off... that might explain it but he is suffering from schizophrenia if I remember it correctly.

angersock6• 11 years ago

s/nigger/idiot/g

There, I fixed it. Do try and use the brain God gave you.

aedocw• 11 years ago

I'm honestly curious, and not trolling here. I've followed some of what Terry Davis has developed, and seen him pop up here frequently as a subject of interest to many. In every thread here, I've seen something like:

Person A: TempleOS is amazing, written by just one guy! I'd love to know more about Terry, someone should do a documentary!

Person B: Terry has a mental disorder, a documentary would just end up [making fun of him|causing more mental issues]

As I understand it he does not believe he has mental issues, but does believe everything he's doing is directly influenced by an entity he perceives to be his God. Any of his supposed mental issues can just as easily be explained as issues of deep faith, a faith most/all of us are incompatible with.

Maybe I'm missing something essential here but what's the difference between Terry Davis and anyone else who believes their lives are being influenced/led by the invisible forces that are part of their religion? If he's crazy, is his brand of crazy significantly different from that of the pope or anyone else who claims to be regularly spoken to by their God?

x5n1• 11 years ago

I think it's fair to say that he's influence by the same thing that created religion in the first place. So yes God is speaking to him, just as God has spoken to all the mentally ill before him and told them to do things that have affected the world in various ways.

As for Terry being racist, so what... He's so far out there, and so far gone, that that's just another flaw in him that we have to accept/overlook.

We should simply accept him without judgment and take from his work whatever we feel like... Just as we do from religion or any other work of technology... People are free to do what they want, and it's not our right to get in the way of whatever they are attempting to accomplish, guided by whatever is out there or in here.

chc• 11 years ago

You may be honestly curious, but I don't think this is a very good topic for discussion here. The question "What is the difference between religion and mental illness?" is something that has been rehashed thousands of times both by famous philosophers and legions of Internet atheists. The short version of one useful answer is "The line is somewhat blurry, and obviously there have been many people who were both religious and mentally ill, but it's usually obvious because most religious people are able to function just fine in society and clearly do not have a crippling mental illness." To go further than that would be pretty far off-topic.

I also feel like it's somewhat in bad taste to attempt to debate this in the explicit context of a member here.

vidarh4• 11 years ago

In his Vice interview [1] he does seem to acknowledge his mental illness and his diagnosis. But that does not mean he can't also (whether because of the mental illness or not) believe he is influenced by God.

But it's pretty clear that "his brand of crazy" is quite distinct from just deep belief. Most people with deepheld religious beliefs don't have manic episodes or start seeing people following them.

[1] http://motherboard.vice.com/read/gods-lonely-programmer

dragonwriter2• 11 years ago

The claim to be regularly spoken to by God is extremely rare among the religious; I know of no modern Pope or other comparable mainstream religious figure who has publicly made such a claim.

bitL• 11 years ago

It's amazing to see that Terry achieves more than most healthy programmers. Kudoz and all the best!

bliti• 11 years ago

I enjoy reading the source code of TempleOS. Its simple and down to earth. No gimmicks or traces of someone trying to show off. The kind of code you just sit down to read whenever the daily grind of battling technical debt gets to you.

cdelsolar• 11 years ago

Look at this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dwa6rU-Y_Ic

It's amazing. He has a whole bunch of videos of his programs. It's fascinating how much stuff he puts out there!

white-flame• 11 years ago

While not very familiar to many, this is highly similar to the old Lisp Machine environments. Those were similarly a clean break from prior OSes, with:

  - a powerful REPL to call either apps, inline tools, or direct commands
  - interactive shells made up of mouse-interactable graphical components being
      printed to the screen
  - compilation of source code directly into the running image

etc.

They were also single-user, but did networking as well. People logged into a machine remotely could have the same interactive graphical sessions in their own context.

Given the history of computing from the 50s - 80s, this desktop architecture idea comes naturally to a lot of people. The major OSes, however, all have their ancestral lineage which prevents major rethinking. But another issue is that these ideas are at least power-user oriented.

While the mobile market did some major rethinks about the UIs, they're still *nix inspired descendants underneath, and don't expose anything but pre-baked applications to their users.

api• 11 years ago

Windows NT is sad for its missed opportunity. MS could have done something inspired by these newer architectures. They did depart from Unix, but to do something in no way better and in many ways worse.

kayamon4• 11 years ago

MS were very inspired, unfortunately by VMS.

yenda2• 11 years ago

I had the same feeling, the good news for PU is that there is still one (virtual) lisp machine standing called GNU/emacs.

lispm• 11 years ago

A Lisp Machine is a real computer with a Lisp OS, applications, libraries and tools. An editor is just a part of that experience. But not the central part. Typically the environment of Lisp Machines was NOT written around the editor. They had a window/mouse/GUI oriented user interface with a lot of support for keyboard use. If you take for example the Lisp Listener in Symbolics Genera, it is not a Zmacs application and it does not use Zmacs in any way - other than that you can switch to Zmacs windows.

GNU Emacs is an editor written in some more primitive Lisp with extensive libraries and applications. It lacks the extensive low-level features, multi-threading, Flavors/CLOS etc of Zetalisp or Interlisp. GNU Emacs implements all their applications inside the editor. Lisp Machines did not do that.

If you've ever used a Lisp Machine, the look&feel was quite different from GNU Emacs.

alxmdev• 11 years ago

Long-term personal projects are the best things you can reward your developer mind with. The dedication and achievement in TempleOS is phenomenal.

bane• 11 years ago

Great article. I really like this kind of open-minded "everything can teach us something" attitude.

I'm not sure I really want to use TemplOS, but if you look at it as a research OS like the article suggests, lots of the ideas here are very compelling. DolDoc sounds like something I wish I had today.

I kind of wonder what could be created if these ideas were filtered through more modern design ideas?

aaronem6• 11 years ago

A lot of the capabilities described for DolDoc, and for TempleOS documents in general, also exist in Emacs' org-mode, albeit of course in a rather different style -- inline images, hyperlinks to live searches as well as static content, and the like.

You can also embed code fragments of arbitrary length, in any or all of dozens of languages, and execute them inline with arbitrary input, including both other sections of the same document and the output of other code snippets therein. (TempleOS seems to have a similar capability, but of course only for the single language in which everything to do with it is implemented.)

ams61103• 11 years ago

It's a cliche, but Emacs really is almost like a LISP operating system disguised as a text editor. It's easily possible to use a computer productively using nothing else, if you devote a bit of time to learning how.

uxcn• 11 years ago

Some of TempleOS actually reminded me of the MOAD[1], and even the Acme[2] editor a bit. The beauty of plain text is that it's trivial to interpret though (not unicode so much). Anything else and you need to start to worry about backward/forward compatibility, byte orders, etc... I imagine it's probably easier when you only have only one platform to think about though.

I liked the index concept. There have been more than one (successful) efforts to build a filesystem that fully supports indexing content, but they're generally implicit indexes. Explicit indexing via file content might be interesting.

I'm not sure what the real justification for running everything in Ring-0 is. I can't think of many reasons for anything more than minimal privileges to be a benefit.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJDv-zdhzMY

[2] http://acme.cat-v.org/

markbnj• 11 years ago

Very interesting article. But ...

> If a crash in one users’ programs could take down all the others, then obviously that would be bad. But for a personal computer, with just one user, this makes no sense. Instead the OS should empower the single user and not get in their way.

My PC doesn't have 100 users, it has 100 processes serving one user. It's nice that they can't stomp all over each other.

But I hear you on the low level access. For me it was a Tandy Color Computer, and then a Columbia 8088 luggable, and finally a 80286. All those systems ran DOS or something similar to it in real mode, and I had fun poking bytes into RAM too :).

UnoriginalGuy• 11 years ago

When I got to the part where the article dismisses memory protection, I just thought "wow someone never used any of the Windows 9x operating systems." Because in that space the lack of memory protection most certainly WAS user impacting, even single user...

The problem is that software is buggy, and without memory protections a buggy piece of code in one process can cause unpredictable things to happen in another. Essentially it turns a process which executes in a "knowable way" into one that executes in a arbitrary way.

Windows 9x suffered from this with drivers in particular, where a single buffer bug in one driver could cause other drivers to seemingly crash, and the root cause was incredibly difficult to track down.

bencollier49• 11 years ago

TempleOS would appear to be a computer from "before the fall" - ie, before error crept in, in the form of viruses and badly-behaved programs... in the same way that the architecure of an IRL temple is designed to be a representation of heaven on earth.

I understand his perspective - computing in the 1980s was very much an age of innocence. The programmer's God/Genius is telling him to build a modern, developed version of the environment that he spent his healthy youth in. I don't suppose it's entirely beyond the realm of possibility that it might hold a key to resolving his problems and coming to terms with his illness.

It may be a trite comment, but in an environment where these conditions are treated as "holy madness" or shamanism, the sufferers have more of a place in society.

cf. John Nash, although Schizophrenia is a scale of greys.

TazeTSchnitzel• 11 years ago

It's funny you mention lack of memory protection in Win9x, because they did have memory protection. They just sadly didn't have it for one critical segment.

A_COMPUTER2• 11 years ago

Ironically, the actual Jewish temple was layered architecturally. The holy of holies in the center, where God resides, would be ring-0 I suppose.

guard-of-terra2• 11 years ago

When you have cheap VMs like modern environments do, you don't need memory protection as bad. Just run a dozen of TempleOS instances. Of course there should be some intranet between them.

simias2• 11 years ago

So instead of using a virtual memory system you use full blown virtual machines with a host system that'll do the virtual memory management for the guests? What exactly do you gain from that?

pjc502• 11 years ago

.. and if those processes come from different vendors, then you effectively have 100 different admins and one user. This is the prevailing situation on mobile devices, where the priority is protecting the single user from potentially malicious vendors.

ams61103• 11 years ago

It’s very easy to be negative, but you will never learn anything new by doing so.

Couldn't agree more, and something I'm going to try to keep in mind more often.

JulianMorrison• 11 years ago

The days when you could be sure of being sole user of your machine ended with the internet, alas. All that compartmentalization is there for a reason.

ebbv3• 11 years ago

While there's an element of truth here, that kernel is being overplayed.

It's important to be open minded, but at the same time it's important to also have a filter for what's actually worth examining in depth and what isn't. Otherwise you waste your time going down fruitless cul-de-sacs to nothing. Which is exactly how you end up spending your life making something completely useless like TempleOS.

Additionally, the author thrives on attention. He's been around forever, it's true. But every time he gets any attention he goes on what seems to be a manic streak which erupts in the racist diatribes and nonsense.

He certainly does need medical attention. He does not need this kind of attention, treating his delusion seriously.

angersock6• 11 years ago

You really want to begrudge somebody getting a little bit of recognition now and again from the community for something they've worked on for such a long time?

And you'd like to go say what they've made is worthless?

I'm really saddened to see such a lack of empathy. In life we procreate and create, offspring and projects the only chance our fleeting sparks have to last into the long night of eternity. We should always be charitable to others who've made something, that we may one day be judged by the same measure.

Empathy aside: how many operating systems (kernel + userland) have you written, chummer?

ebbv3• 11 years ago

The amount of time and effort you've put into something has no bearing on its quality, and thus whether it deserves recognition or not. It's absurd to think it does.

And you'd like to go say what they've made is worthless?

It's patently obvious that it's worthless. What possible use does it serve? Morbid curiosity is the best you can say for it.

We should always be charitable to others who've made something, that we may one day be judged by the same measure.

I judge my own work by an even less charitable measure than I'm using on TempleOS.

Empathy aside: how many operating systems (kernel + userland) have you written, chummer?

This is the most ridiculous/tired response on the face of the earth to all criticism. "How many movies have you made?" "How many hit songs have you written?"

The fact that you even think that's a valid response says more about you than me.

kayamon4• 11 years ago

It's not useless if you learn something from it. If you don't want to learn anything, that's fine.

But I certainly learned a few new ideas from taking some time to judge it objectively.

If tomorrow someone launched a new Linux shell because of an interesting idea they'd seen in TempleOS, or was inspired to write a new IDE which borrowed some features, then the world is a better place for it.

p.s. everyone thrives on attention.

ebbv3• 11 years ago

If tomorrow someone launched a new Linux shell because of an interesting idea they'd seen in TempleOS

Yeah, this is not going to happen.

A) It's been around for a long time.

B) He's not some misunderstood genius full of great ideas.

stereoradio• 11 years ago

Of course TempleOS has little practical value; even Terry would admit that. However, it is inspirational on a number of levels:

It's the preservation and extension of an archaic, dying style of computing: the single-user, programming-oriented, low-level and transparently-abstracted environment once common amongst micros.

It's going against the grain and doing something different in a time when (for very good practical reason) popular environments are approaching monoculture.

It's a tremendous achievement for a single person.

It's proof that not only can people create amazing things in spite of mental illnesses, but also because of them.

It's sad that even on Hacker News, there are people that can't accept that programs themselves can be art (more than simply the "engine" behind a work of art).

dang5• 11 years ago

It's time to retire the disputes about Terry's mental health and his use of racist language that perennially dominate these threads. These arguments are always the same, they lead nowhere of value, and it's wrong to gossip about a human being as a case specimen as if he weren't here.

We've had years of this already and it's enough. If someone wants to do the work of making a list of threads we've had about it in the past, we can all point to that the next time someone inevitably starts this controversy up again.

I'm not talking about Terry's technical work, of course. That is as on topic as anyone else's.

phaus• 11 years ago

it's not right to gossip about a human being as a case specimen as if he weren't here.

Well said. Its infuriating the lack of common courtesy and sensitivity that people show in threads about his work.

It seems to me that he would, like most of us would in his situation, want to be judged on the merits of his work, without other people constantly framing in the context of his mental illness.

jakejake2• 11 years ago

It would be easier if his posts were only bizzare or incoherent. Even his messia complex would probably be forgivable. The condescending, rude and racist things he says are just extremely hard to overlook. Giving one person a free pass at the expense of many others being able to come hear and not see racist, hateful speech tolerated. It's a shame as smart as he is he can't seem to figure out that certain terms are just not ok to use in a public forum (or anywhere really). I'm not even sure he means them as they are verbalized anyway.

Terry_Fan• 11 years ago

You can start by un-hellbanning him if you want to treat him like a human being.

It is failing to treat someone as a human being. You are ignoring them because you perceive their mental illness to be dangerous. You're failing to make eye contact with him, because you think he is an animal.

The admins on this site need to do a lot of soul searching if they are ok with this. And now I'm hellbanned for speaking up for terry. Fuck you hackernews.

dragonwriter2• 11 years ago

Lots of human beings are hellbanned. Anyone else who posted the way he does would, almost certainly, be hellbanned.

Hellbanning is not failing to treat him like a human being.

If you want to make the argument that there is a good reason consistent with the purpose of the community to excuse conduct in his case that would otherwise merit hellbanning, that might be an argument with merit -- without the argument being made, I don't see it, but it might be there. But, in any case, that's not am argument you've made.

wumbernang2• 11 years ago

Agree. Hellbanning is a step too far. If you're going to ban someone, just kill their account honestly, not let them toil away posting.

Nursie2• 11 years ago

His mental health directly impacts and influences what he writes.

dang5• 11 years ago

As is true of anyone. Not seeing the point here.

pmelendez• 11 years ago

Some of his remarks are actually technical and relevant but invisible to most people (only accounts with the show-dead-threads flag active can see them). It would be nice if one could sponsor just those comments, I think would be a good thing for him too.

Lawtonfogle• 11 years ago

And yet what he writes can be judged on its own merits. Only in issues of trust should character come into the question. I am most familiar with an attack on character being a technique that allows for a person to dismiss some writing without effort.

If someone with a mental illness writes a word salad, it can be dismissed as a word salad, not because the write has mental issues, but becasue the writing is a word salad.

That said, it takes time to read and judge the merits of a writing, and give a limit to our time we all develop heuristics to help us determine to help us avoid wasting time.

IndianAstronaut2• 11 years ago

There should be a separation of the person and their work. Hubble had unsavory views, but those do not come up when discussing the speed of galaxies.

madaxe_again• 11 years ago

Indeed. Newton was a devout alchemist/occultist who believed he could find the temple of Solomon - but it doesn't make gravitation or his laws of motion irrelevant.

tomasien• 11 years ago

Obsession by one person doesn't always work out for that person, but it does so often provide insights that are instructive to a level that would have been unfathomable to an outside observer at the start of the project/obsession. Not surprised TempleOS seems to have similar qualities, even though even now it seems to be a pretty bizarre project.

pcorey• 11 years ago

I wrote a Julia Set viewer in HolyC about 6 months ago. It was a very interesting experience to say the least.

Terry seemed to think it was pretty cool, so he made a 3rd Party Software page and linked to the GitHub repo.

https://github.com/pcorey/julia-templeos/blob/master/julia.C...

oconnor6633• 11 years ago

How does installing software work without networking?

robin_reala• 11 years ago

I feel very old now. Traditionally you went to the shop, bought your boxed set of floppies[1] (or later CDs, though networking was becoming ubiquitous at this point) then went home and installed them one by one to your hard drive. I was early among my friends to get a modem in 1990 (along with a Compuserve subscription), but before that every piece of software I had was bought or copied from friends on floppy disk.

[1] http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7112/7488906888_f49800754f_z.j...

c3d• 11 years ago

Seeing projects like this makes me wonder: how come great ideas often fail to be picked up, when bad ones are repeated again and again.

Take the idea of having a single language for the shell and system programming. It forces you to think harder about the design of the language, so that it correctly works both as a command-line interpreter and as a compiled language. Lisp machines had that. Oberon system had that (in a graphical way, even). Forth systems had that. So it's not like we collectively didn't know. But neither Unix nor DOS/Windows even tried. Instead, they both feature shell languages that can best be described as "pathetic". Why did we have to wait until Windows 10 to have useful text selection in the CMD shell?

Or in programming languages, why is it that new languages always seem to take C and C++ as role models, while spectacularly failing to take any inspiration from Erlang, Ada, SmallTalk, Intentional Software, or Lisp? Why is XL, my own language, still the only one I know where it's easy to do multi-operator overloading, i.e. overload A+B*C, something it has been doing for at least a decade? Why are we unable to create a language that would work well both on GPUs and CPUs, or better yet, let me easily describe an application that uses both?

Or in interactive apps, why do we still not have good reactive functional frameworks for the web, similar to what Tao3D does for interactive 3D? (See http://bit.ly/1G8VOmr for my rant on that topic). Why is creating an OpenGL application getting more complex with each generation, instead of simpler? Why can a kid easily use GameMaker, but none of the Apple developer tools?

Or in operating systems, why did Linus Torvalds decide to mimick Unix and not the kind of mind-blowing operating system design ideas that were floating at the time? Like TaOS, the OS that was recompiling byte code at page-in time and could run a same program on different processor architectures during its lifetime? Or like MacOS, the original one, and its built-in graphical toolbox where, unlike X11, you could easily draw an ellipse inside a rectangle irrespective of line width? Or like GeOS and its 64K-based multitasking OS with vector fonts and GUI apps?

In summary, why is it that we always seems to ignore good ideas, but have no concerns repeating bad ones?

My theory is that inferior technology needs superior marketing, and that's how you win in the end. That's just a theory, of course ;-)

pjc502• 11 years ago

The canonical article on this is http://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html from 25 years ago.

The common thread in what you're saying is "why do people not choose (technically pleasing solution) over (familiar solution with known warts)", and the answer to that is that change is really expensive and unpopular. Especially if it forces people to abandon their existing custom tooling, workflow, infrastructure, and skills.

Would most people use a new operating system with no web browser? Probably not. So that sets a minimum bar on the quantity of software you have to port to get it adopted. Which is a vast amount, especially if you want to write it in a new language as well. And new languages have new pitfalls.

For the shell, it's not clear that the same language is necessarily ideal: shell commands are ephemeral and the user wants to type as little as possible, while code lives forever and is generally more complex. Strong type systems and other forms of testability are important for code but clutter for the command line.

Linux chose Minix to replicate partially because he'd been taught it at university and partially because he could leverage the GNU infrastructure.

yenda2• 11 years ago

Worse is better

edit : damn it took me too long without refreshing the page to answer someone did it better

near• 11 years ago

What really gets to me about all this is that I probably see more articles about losethos/TempleOS than I do about the BSDs.

There's a whole world of hundreds of small and innovative hobbyist/niche OSes (Sortix to name just one), but we only ever hear about this one. Again and again, over and over, because the author's mental health makes for good clickbait articles for people to gawk and stare at, apparently. It's really quite sickening.

I'm okay with this article though, I like that it presented something new for a change.

fit2rule• 11 years ago

I wonder how far off TempleOS is to implementing the kid of environment envisioned by Bret Victor?

See: http://worrydream.com/ExplorableExplanations/

It seems to me that the way that the HolyC environment is designed, we're not far off from having a pretty decent implementation of some of Brets' concepts .. it at least seems closer than the features offered in other OS's for this kind of interaction.

Perhaps some enterprising disciple of both TempleOS and Worrydream will find motivation to push the last %5 of work through to completion .. seems like an exciting opportunity to do something truly innovative.

rectangletangle2• 11 years ago

This is basically how I've been viewing the project.

Like an esoteric programming language, it's likely never going to be used as a mainstream or practical system. However, Terry has been afforded the opportunity to create this system with few external constraints; this is one of the reasons it utilizes so many novel approaches. It could likely influence features in more practical systems.

People get too worked up about solving immediate problems, and often never see the forest through the trees. He may end up solving problems we never even realized were problems.

JSnake2• 11 years ago

Any look at an OS that doesn't consider the platform's usability is pretty suspect, and this article doesn't even mention TempleOS' usability. It really doesn't matter how many good ideas an OS or any other platform has if it isn't at all usable. And TempleOS is the most unusable platform I've ever seen.

Immortalin• 11 years ago

<code>In this video Terry gives a brief tour of some of the more interesting features of TempleOS. At 5:50, he shows how to build a small graphical application from scratch. Now let’s just think about how you’d do this in Windows for a second. Consider for a minute how much code would be needed to register a windowclass, create a window, do some GDI commands, run a message pump, etc. You’d need to set up a Visual Studio project perhaps, and either use the resource editor to embed a bitmap, or try and load it from disk somehow. Now compare it to the tiny snippet of code that Terry writes to accomplish the same task. It certainly makes you wonder where we went so wrong.</code> Before MS killed Visual Basic 6, it was also almost this easy..

A Constructive Look at TempleOS

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