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Comment by oofabz | Hacker News Reader

I have a lot of respect for Terry and it's nice to see him included alongside other developers. He's not the most likeable guy, but I doubt he's happy about that either.

He writes software to be beautiful. He can take pride in his work because his intentions are absolutely pure. When I program, I take shortcuts to ship as quickly as possible, and then I throw some ads on the final product to make money. I am a sellout, but Terry is not, and I envy him for that.

I especially like his HolyC language. It is simple, elegant, and comfortably familiar:

http://www.templeos.org/Wb/Doc/HolyC.html

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When we speak of TempleOS, and you mention "He can take pride in", I am reminded of this wonderful thread at mefi from 2012:

Terry:

"The flight simulator reduces how far you can see into the distance and how wide the display is. It's nothing to be proud of, except, it show the potential for absolute control over the other cores from within a game."

Commenter, in response:

"bro i think you can be proud of the flight simulator you wrote for the operating system you also wrote"

It made my day to see him on "usesthis".

That's always been my favorite response to him, as well. It made me tear up a bit reading it.

Here's the thread, for anyone interested: http://www.metafilter.com/119424/An-Operating-System-for-Son...

thanks for the link, that was a great read.

No kidding. When one looks at everything he's wrote from scratch thus far, it is more than very impressive. If not for the skills, at least for the dedication. I get bored with projects 1/10th of the size.

Programmers don't realize how much they lose by constantly chasing the latest language, the latest frameworks, the latest new abstractions of software development that require so much past work to be thrown away. Terry's volume of output is available to anyone that's willing to just whittle away at one thing, in small pieces, for more than a few years.

(I'm not diminishing Terry's volume of work here, but encouraging other programmers to consider adopting a nice, slow side project.)

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