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Comment by shawn | Hacker News Reader

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shawn·

These accomplishments, however, don't in any way excuse his egregious behavior.

Every time TempleOS comes up, someone chimes in with a remark like this. Can't we just focus on the technical aspects?

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Agreed. He wrote an operating system, a compiler and a whole lot more. That kind of achievement deserves respect.

Can we separate the cause for what drove him to do that from what caused his other, less acceptable, behavior? There's been a lot of looking purely at the technical merits of stuff in the past few decades, with quite little attention paid to the causes or effects of the technology in question, to my mind. I'm not sure it's left us in a particularly good position.

It's better if you get out in front of it before someone with no knowledge of Terry's history comes in guns blazing with accusations that Terry is a mega racist evil person.

No, because his behavior really is over the top and is going to draw attention every single time.

It is his project. It's his legacy. I don't see how you can separate him from what he created - I never got the feeling that he wanted anyone to - so why should we? History is what it is - let's recognize that and look at the good with the bad.

Easy to separate. You dont think about a singer's private life doing drugs to be able to enjoy their music. Why is it different here? And if you only follow folks who have never said anything wrong in their whole life, well you cant do much anymore can you? Because true saints are rare to come by.

Some singer doing drugs wasn't trying to hurt anyone. It's a simple difference.

Who is Terry trying to hurt?

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