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Comment by mghackerlady | Hacker News Reader

People joke about templeos a lot, but it had some really neat ideas (holy-c is a pretty nice language)

I've dug around the TempleOS codebase a bit, and while it certainly is impressive for a single guy's work, I think there's been an overcorrection where people act like Terry was some hyper genius instead of "a pretty smart guy".

I kind of got the impression that whenever Terry didn't know how to do something, he would just convince himself that that's not what God wanted anyway and stop doing it.

I like that mindset. "This bug is not meant to be solved."

I don't think most people actually believe he was one of the smartest people of all time or anything. He was obviously a seriously talented programmer, and impressively so: when you consider the number of humans that can program at all on earth, and then the number that can write a compiler, and a complete operating system/desktop environment/shell/games, while suffering from severe mental illness no less—you end up with a vanishingly small group.

Most of the people we think of geniuses are not smarter than the average smart person, but they persevered more. Terry had the ultimate driver of perseverance: severe mental illness.

It should have been HolyBasic. Mistyping a HolyC indirection in an editor causes the OS to crash.

We would still have an issue with bad POKEs though.

It didn't cause a problem in my Commodore 64. ROM4L

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