Was it created by a non-racist, mentally-healthy, socially apt individual wouldn't it be regarded as a neat but not extra-ordinary hobby project?
I believe it would not be so frequently a topic at HN front page. But I would like to hear others opinions on this.
IMO TempleOS is quite extra-ordinary! From the article's conclusion:
"Watching TempleOS execute its built-in test suite is a jaw-dropping experience. I can't help but be impressed as a vast number of demos, games, graphing calculators, debuggers, and compilers all fly before your eyes. To see the sheer amount of content that's been written here over the years, to see such effort expended on a labor of love, is wonderfully heart-warming."
TempleOS does some really cool things. JITed C derivative, unified terminal/texteditor/documentation, and a lot of other cool things.
Just because Terry is "different" doesn't mean his work is any less valuable. More people may see it because of his "antics" but there are still cool things he has done.
It is common for people to look at a creative work and say/think "Phftt...I could do that." The proof that a person is mistaken is that they don't and won't and never will.
TempleOS is a vision of what computing might have been like if the middle ages never ended. What if computing technology developed in a monastery for the purpose of glorifying God? (Like illuminated manuscripts and sacred architecture.) We'd expect odd mixtures of the archaic and innovative, weird technological taboos and lots of anachronisms that only made sense theologically. Something like TempleOS.
Knuth's obsession was rewarded by society, while Davis's was scorned. Neither did any real harm.
Terry's online behavior has grown increasingly odd, but he project's fame pre-dates the odd behavior
That's some serious paranoia there.
Canada works.
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2015/jun/02/dont-use-joh...
> Whether the rumours are true, I can’t say, but what’s certain is that the truth of Nash’s experience, the way in which he struggled and ultimately succeeded in using the power of his rational mind to overcome his delusional thinking, was replaced with a straightforward lie. And whatever the rationale behind it, the wholly disingenuous use of Nash’s recovery to promote the use of anti-psychotics is to my mind unconscionable.
I think in the coming decades we'll come to see the excessive use of long-term psychiatric medication as barbaric as we now understand the use of therapeutic lobotomies in centuries past to be.
He wrote it in HolyC language which is an interesting project on its own: http://www.templeos.org/Wb/Doc/HolyC.html.
You can change the OS because of the JIT compiler, run the compiler, and overwrite the running OS.
The command line is interesting. It feeds directly into a JIT compiler, so you have things like Cd("..").
It runs in a single memory space, so processes communicate with each other by writing to each others memory space.
It's built by one person without feedback or collaboration with others.
There are code walk throughs available that you can learn from: http://www.templeos.org/Wb/Home/Web/TOSVideos.html
I wish the OSDev community could have a more constructive dialog with Terry and his project.
Well, there are apps with thousands of users, based on Electron and NW.js, that do "barely anything" and yet load slowly as molasses and use half your CPU.
What's Slack doing compared to a full (if primitive) OS and userland?
Connecting to the internet.
Slack's app has to display images, render scrolling, respond to network events, store and load application state like your preferences and theme, etc. Assuming it does these things - I use the web client.
Slack also has to support multiple operating systems, so it may make technology choices around that.
It's really not hard at all to see why Slack would be much slower than an OS that basically does nothing to boot up.
It's not hard at all to see why Windows, which supports tons of hardware, would be larger on disk and slower to unpack as it boots - lots of drivers and services need to start up to support all of the things that make it not TempleOS.
You seem to underestimate what TempleOS does and overestimate what Slack does. We had apps 10x more complex than Slack (with network IO et all) in 1995 -- and they run faster.
Now using the web stack for Slack desktop might very well be a business decision (and a good one at that), but it's one of the worst performance decisions you can make.