Why Davis' TempleOS is better than Torvald's Linux | Hacker News Reader

Why Davis' TempleOS is better than Torvald's Linux

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98 pointsSwellJoe53 comments

Most of us will never use TempleOS, few will appreciate the skill shown here and fewer will understand Davis' religious goals. But you could also look at TempleOS as a research prototype, roughly the kind of thing which once might have been produced at Xerox PARC, and see that TempleOS implements some startlingly interesting ideas.

For example, in this demo, the way that graphics are treated inline with source text and text in the terminal, and the way that definitions are updated everywhere they're used might seem arbitrary or crazy if you don't think about it. Is this thing just for games? Once you look past the religious stuff and realize the similarity to MATLAB and IPython notebook, but in the shell, you might start to realize it's a powerful idea with serious applications.

I'll stop there, but there are many more examples to be gleaned. Davis' ideas are like that. They don't advertise very well, this is the opposite end of the universe from the HN marketing ethos. But if you stop trying to tear down disadvantaged people for using improper words in an idiosyncratic way, and pay attention to what's actually going on, maybe you'll be rewarded by seeing something interesting. Assuming you aren't another money-grubbing, egoistic blowhard or hanger-on to the startup scene with no real interest in computers.

TempleOS is like a window onto an alternate history of personal computing, full of things which could have been done for years but which nobody got around to doing, or which didn't even occur to anyone. I'm really glad that someone is exploring these unique ideas.

I don't think anyone here is trying to tear Davis down. It's just that his writings can reflect poorly on our community as a whole to those who aren't familiar with his circumstances. In the current climate of hit-piece, shoot-first-ask-questions-never outrage journalism, for which the straw man of the out-of-touch privileged techie is a favorite punching bag, you can't be too careful.

I'd say we've pretty much gone full circle.

Suffocating levels of political correctness alongside a self-obsessed victim culture have made a lot of people sympathetic to the trope of the outrageous, out of touch savant.

I admit it's hard to balance the approaches behind "He's just a troubled person," "He's a raving nut," "He's a raving nut, but so what?" and so on.

> I admit it's hard to balance the approaches behind "He's just a troubled person," "He's a raving nut," "He's a raving nut, but so what?" and so on.

Do you mean Davis or Torvalds?

Frankly, I'd avoid both of them.

Or Theo DeRaat

At the same time his approach to others, would make him an extremly difficult person to work with. I enjoy looking at some of his work, but I could never actually work with him, which is quite sad.

As someone stridently critical of this community, the way people like you approach Davis reflects more poorly on the community than the presence of an individual with religious mania--especially if you contrast religious mania and greedy mania.

Reputation, reputation, reputation--often that's all this place seems to think about.

Obviously I'm broadly generalizing from what you might have intended to be a considerate comment.

But the masses of homeless in San Francisco are mostly ignored by the tech community, perhaps because it's easier on the mind to squelch with a hellban.

comparing this to IPython Notebook is a big stretch and an insult to MATLAB and IPython notebook. There's no way this would have ever come out of PARC, you're exaggerating Davis's work. Also, it's impossible to "look past the religious stuff" - it's part of, all of TempleOS.

To me this is just a crazy guy who's been tinkering with 80s technology while the rest of the world has moved on. I feel bad for him , but I just don't buy the "powerful idea with serious applications"

If you don't mind my engaging you:

What 'insult' (imho insult is in the mind of the beholder, but that's for another day)? Do you see the religious stuff, in being un-overlookable, also as some kind of insult? But more important to me is your critique of his experiment; do you really feel "bad for him" for exploring ideas of his own labor? C'mon, isn't that what a hacker is? Surely it matters more to be true to your self than to align with the world's reputations. Thank you for your time.

This takes me back to when computers had a lot fewer layers. He's inspired by Apple ][ and C64, but it's also reminiscent of Smalltalk-80 and Lisp machines, with the live UI links, inspectors, first-class graphic objects... I also enjoyed the birds screeching in mid demo.

I find TempleOS endlessly fascinating. The author is troubled, but an impressive coder nonetheless. The C compiler REPL covered in this video is actually kinda awesome.

Kinda like a lispm for C

Kudos to Davis, I'm a big fan. Writing TempleOS: amazing. Writing TempleOS with the dog or bird background noise you hear around 5:00 in the video: more than amazing!

There is one point in this demonstration where it looks like TempleOS is monitoring the registers in "real-time".

It looked like in one column he had the names of the registers and in the other column the memory addresses stored in them, updating on the screen as he worked.

Is this what I was seeing or am I mistaken?

The OS also seems to track what each CPU is doing in the scrolling banners; and there was a brief view of a screen that showed detailed swap statistics, again changing in "real-time".

The values displayed are retrieved each time the window is redrawn, which might be each time he moves the cursor or at a set frame-rate. It obviously doesn't detect changes in memory then print those changes on screen immediately.

Log file instead of screen.

Has Davis ever explained why he believes that his operating system is a holy relic, an artifact particularly close to God? And if so, which part of it is holy - the contents of the filesystem, the state of the runtime, or both?

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

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8658283

The random number generator as God concept has been stuck in my head since I first read that Vice article. In games, both tabletop and computer games, the RNG plays the role of God (a mysterious power that can bring good or bad fortune and even life or death). It's interesting how that idea plays out in a schizophrenic mind.

Heh, i keep seeing roguelike players go "bless RNGsius" or similar when they get a particularly potent item.

I've spent a lot of time playing nethack (possibly the most hours I have spent in any game). That may be why this was such a striking thing to me. I may have internalized some of that logic, even if only in a humorous manner, and so perhaps it resonates with me that someone might genuinely believe that the RNG is a way to communicate with God. There's a charming, if naive, logic to it; after all, if God created everything and is omniscient, why couldn't they have built the universe such that you would ask the right question at the right time to get the right answer from an RNG (which are all deterministic, if you have control over enough of the variables, as God presumably would). It's kinda like a modern version of astrology, I guess, in that interpretation and what questions you ask determine the outcome more than the stars or the RNG.

Thank you. I found this quote most illuminating:

But the idea of a digital oracle grew out of his earlier methods for talking to God. At first he’d open a Bible to a random page, and it would speak.

TempleOS is technologically more sophisticated than a randomly opened bible, but no less (or more) holy a source of God's word. It would follow then that if you were not moved by the act of randomly accessing information from a book, then you would not be moved by digitally mediated random access. (The converse is also true.)

TempleOS rocks, indeed. Amazing work. And in a very small codebase.

This is a feature I'd actually really like to have in an actual terminal. The ability to display graphics would be useful for many things.

There are several that do it, this article mentions a few and shows how to do it in xterm.

http://www.stenyak.com/archives/1208/trick-of-the-day-render...

Not mentioned in that article, there's also Terminology, which can display all sorts of dynamic media and things.

https://www.enlightenment.org/p.php?p=about/terminology

I remember there used to be a DVI viewer for xterm's tektronix mode. It would render the fonts by drawing a sequence of horizontal lines for runs of pixels.

It's a shame nothing ever came of TermKit.

http://acko.net/blog/on-termkit/

Nice. I just plotted an image older than myself (/usr/share/doc/plotutils/tek2plot/dmerc.tek.gz)!

Okay, Terminus looks pretty good. I wish rxvt could do this, too. Thanks for those links.

If Linux is booted with vesafb enabled, many programs can draw graphics without using X.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_framebuffer

SDL and SVGAlib http://www.libsdl.org/ http://www.svgalib.org/

Is it essentially a C interpreter that runs on the metal? Or is there more to it? What about device drivers?

It's emphatically not an interpreter. It's a just-in-time, line-by-line compiler.

Probably the most fascinating OS ever.

After reading a bit in the reddit comment history, I think I'll just ignore him and his projects from now on:

http://www.reddit.com/r/TempleOS_Official/comments/2pfp2j/th...

Quote:

> God is not PRNG. I wish there weren't so many niggers who think all random number are PRNG. These nigger seriosuly don't know you can get non-PRNG numbers, but true random.

He is mentally ill. I wouldn't want to work directly with him, and I wouldn't want him in any position of authority over anyone else (because he's clearly not a nice person). But, I think he and his OS are interesting as hell, from a number of angles.

You're certainly welcome to dismiss everything anyone who is an asshole ever said or did (I kinda feel that way about Orson Scott Card, despite loving Ender's Game). But, I'm probably gonna keep reading about TempleOS as a fascinating hacker subject.

"So now we're gonna put colors in. North America should be red, like Native Americans, [...] Asia should be yellow, [...] and Africa should be black."

"However, no continent is represented by any specific ring. Prior to 1951, the official handbook stated that each color corresponded to a particular continent: blue for Europe, yellow for Asia, black for Africa, green for Australia and Oceania and red for the Americas; this was removed because there was no evidence that Coubertin had intended it (the quote above was probably an afterthought)." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olympic_symbols#The_Rings

Focusing on this small part of the video is stupid and just baiting

Why did you leave out the parts that are inconvenient to the narrative you're making up? "Europe should be blue" - is that racist?

I guess the technical achievement means nothing. Where is your certificate of political correctness?

Why is it socially acceptable to bully like this?

Turn on "Show dead" and visit https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=TempleOS

Even if this particular case wasn't racist it's easy to understand why things Davis says could be interpreted as such.

What's the point of bringing it up, though? How is that relevant to a technical video like this one? Furthermore, how is it fair to put the things he says under the same scrutiny as a person who doesn't have schizophrenia?

it isn't inconvenient to the narrative, though it might not be immediately obvious

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_blood

calling out racism isn't bullying and it's incoherent to label it as such, davis has a long history of racist ranting much more offensive than labeling africa black. he's mentally ill and it's sad but it's not to be overlooked

No, "calling someone out" for being mentally ill is bullying. Even if that illness takes the form of racist rants.

Please delete this comment it adds nothing to this technical discussion and is just pure troll bait.

"why templeOS is better, but it doesn't matter"

Title is a bit misleading this seams mainly like a form of shell, comparing it to Torvals linux kernel or unix seams wierd.

As a shell however i feel it is a interesting change of perspective.

The shell is what you see, but there's a full OS underneath it, including a window manager and whatnot. You can reprogram any part of the OS dynamically from this shell, which is the main point Terry is trying to make - it's an OS aimed at hackers who he thinks should have 100% control over the system down to the hardware - and he has a novel way of enabling that to happen with an interpreter and JIT compiler for his dialect of C, and a single memory space for all "processes".

I got that there was an OS underneath but i don't see how that matters. As you could do the same in unix if you had a shell/api that hooked in at the right place.

That "novel" idea was common in Xerox PARC machines.

I didn't claim the idea was novel, only that Davis's implementation is novel. The idea of a single address space operating system which can be modified while it's running is older than unix.

I misunderstood it then.

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