> (it has a C-like syntax but is kind of like C64 Basic; this is deliberate)
BASIC is accessible, it's easy to use, but because it is relatively flat and unstructured, it tends to resist good design and architecture. HolyC is like C, kinda, but mostly from the name: Terry managed to fix BASIC without breaking most of the good stuff, the PEEK/POKE and the accessibility. That's an achievement, I think most people couldn't do it. I couldn't. I think most people also wouldn't try. Nobody respects BASIC, so it's not a really prestigious thing to do. (Maybe it should be; Hamming attributes Fortran's success to its "psychological design", rather than "logical design" ALGOL had: Fortran was designed to be used rather than to be beautiful.)
What he said he wanted was to recreate the experience of a C64: make something that anyone could boot up and hack. If you break it, hit the reset switch, try again. One graphics mode instead of a manual where you look up what number you write to what register to get into one of the modes where you have sprites and then the memory location of the sprites, and he picked a graphics mode that was high-res enough to be able to produce interesting pictures but not so big that doing a frame in HolyC took longer than the vsync.
When the C64 was on people's desks, that's how it was, more or less: you flip the switch, the OS is BASIC on a ROM, it boots right away. You interact with the system using a programming language as a shell, like Unix or like most OSs. They had magazines, people would subscribe to these magazines and read BASIC listings, sometimes to read them or sometimes to just type them in and use them. Usually games but someone writes a program to balance your checkbook or something.
Terry said he wanted to bring back hobbyist programming. I think that's really cool; I think he mostly succeeded. The one thing you don't see people doing, though, is sharing listings for HolyC programs they wrote or interesting bits of the TempleOS source. I see people posting a lot of stuff but mostly videos of Terry, they don't seem to share code a lot. I'm the same way, but I don't really hack TempleOS.
I think Unix shell is like a lingua franca, but not quite as accessible as a BASIC system, a lot more complicated; doesn't really fit Terry's goals.
But I like tossing around fragments or complete scripts in awk or sh or rc (and rc is enough like sh if you don't do a lot of structure and you're just writing a simple pipeline). I like when people dump those on fedi; you don't usually see that. You're more likely to see someone paste a link to a pastebin on their private git-style webshit, the private git-style webshit wants you to solve a captcha or have your browser grind out some proof-of-work, it loads a shit-ton of jabbascribs (and won't show you the text without it), and then you see five lines of bash that would have fit into the post on fedi. I wonder: why not just post it?
I think TempleOS lacks a really good means of sharing programs like that, but I don't know. I looked for a way to spit the contents of a file out to a serial port, maybe there isn't one; I couldn't find one. I mean, the obvious cynical explanation is that people like that Terry said cusses and was crazy and very few people even booted his OS in qemu. I haven't done much with it, I have just poked around a little, and I love weird shit like that.
I wonder if that's why: if it were a little easier to get a listing of a TempleOS program and post it somewhere, would you see people showing people their TempleOS programs and talking about them?
There's this kind of split in the Forth community, or at least Forth people say that there is: the people that have an academic interest in analyzing Forth and the people that like using Forth. So there's another explanation, maybe: people don't really like to use TempleOS, they just like to hack on it, add things that are "missing". There's Shrine and EXODUS and TinkerOS, forks of the OS, but you don't see a lot of people passing around code or explaining how their demo works. templeos_2017.11.20_19-52.iso
@p Cyberia has the largest amount of TempleOS devs per capita of any other instance, so you can actually ask @Inginsub and @crunklord420 for input directly (maybe @nroot too, if he ever checks his account). @bara also posts a lot of drawings made with Inginsub's HolyPaint; don't remember if it ever went public or not. Also there's now this: https://github.com/slon-project/slon
I don't know if I am impressed that they managed to do this or horrified that they missed the entire point of TempleOS in order to shit on Terry's corpse, and then to add insult to injury, the dependencies list makes it look like something retarded is afoot.
@p@Inginsub@bara@crunklord420@nroot yeah, a textboard/bbs hosted on vanilla TempleOS witohut a whole TCP/IP stack and accessible over Tor would've been more fitting.
@mint@Inginsub@bara@crunklord420@nroot@p >website has no info >presumably all the info about the project is in the discord >on the website is niggaelephant something is amiss
@i@Inginsub@bara@crunklord420@nroot@p There also was TINE that did the same thing but the Korean twink nuked his socials at least 15 times since then so I can't find it.
@mint@Inginsub@bara@crunklord420@i@nroot I mean, whatever they are, those are the boring things, it's people trying to add a motor to a bicycle so that they don't have to pedal instead of just getting a motorcycle.
I'm wondering why you don't see people posting their alternative elephant code or something and I suspect it's because there's not a good way to exfiltrate a random file. A serial port interface would probably actually do that.
> On other hand, Terry was never explicitly against networking, either.
I've seen that, yes; he does appear to be talking about clients, not servers.
Even if he didn't explicitly reject these things, though, he did specifically endorse a lot of uses. I think it was pretty cool, I wonder what prevented that from being the main use of the OS.
@p@bara@crunklord420@nroot@mint the way I see it, if you can do something inside TempleOS while only using built-in tools or tools you wrote yourself, it's fair game. God wanted you to do whatever you want with your computer.
One additional limitation I have set for myself is not using other people's code at all, including porting, adapting or reading it to look up a solution to a specific problem.
@p >I think TempleOS lacks a really good means of sharing programs like that, but I don't know. I looked for a way to spit the contents of a file out to a serial port, maybe there isn't one; I couldn't find one.
Not a built-in one, but Crunk wrote it. It allows you to send files over serial at 115.2k, which is fine for text or orther small files, but any time I want to export a distro ISO, it takes forever.
>So there's another explanation, maybe: people don't really like to use TempleOS, they just like to hack on it, add things that are "missing".
This is correct, and for a good reason: TempleOS doesn’t have much to offer to a user. The built-in games are bad or at least lacking, the only good game doesn’t work, there’s no drawing program (on a system that feels like a natural choice for 4-bit pixel art), the standard sprite editor is unusable, and there are no other multimedia capabilities by design; the only entertainment you have is a text editor and a compiler. It’s for people like nroot and me, those who enjoy making stuff and don’t care if anyone will ever use it.
That being said, HolyPaint - the drawing program I’ve been writing on and off - has one active user, which is likely more than any other TempleOS program not written by Terry himself. Bara is a saint though, and I don’t think anyone else is going to put up with its idiosyncrasies.
@Inginsub@p I suspect a lot of Terry fans are people who see programming as a spectator sport, spending lots of time watching other people doing it on stream and talking about languages and whatnot while rarely writing any code themselves. someday they're gonna do something, they've got big plans, but they never put in the work
Terry was absolutely in love with the C64 so I hate to suggest that he missed something, but I think "no way to share code listings" is a big hole; it's likely I missed something.
> any time I want to export a distro ISO, it takes forever
Incentive to keep thee code size down. :terrylol2:
> TempleOS doesn’t have much to offer to a user. The built-in games are bad or at least lacking, the only good game doesn’t work, there’s no drawing program
Maybe it should have even less stuff. No one complains about this kind of thing being missing on a C64 emulator. It dumped you into a BASIC prompt. Regular users were expected to at least be able to type someone else's code in. I mean, look, this magazine has a little text and the bulk is, like, half ads and half BASIC program listings: https://archive.org/details/01-your-commodore-magazine/page/n15/mode/2up . People exchanging runes, they'd pay money to get printouts mailed to them.
> I see people posting a lot of stuff but mostly videos of Terry, they don't seem to share code a lot. I'm the same way, but I don't really hack TempleOS.
I've seen releases from at least 3 people... 2 here on fedi.
@p@Inginsub@deprecated_ii I, an expert programmer, have compiled and run "Hello World" on 4 different ISAs across at least 9 different operating systems.
@dsm Yeah, I mean, I think the thing that I expected to see is more like that archive.org link I posted. People get all hung up, it doesn't have an email client. It's supposed to be a vehicle to sit down and play with the machine. I wonder if that kind of thing even makes sense to most people.
>I don't know if I am impressed that they managed to do this or horrified that they missed the entire point of TempleOS in order to shit on Terry's corpse
The thing is, why do you care? You're not going to use TempleOS anyway (you've only poked around, according to you, so I assume you've never done serious development in it or explored it), this is just ideological concern trolling for an overly memed software platform made by a man whose opinions are venerated for the sole reason of being paranoid of the government and being fond of slurs who did not write any substantial code after 2013 (or even earlier). People who "praise" TempleOS (ie, regurgitating superficial technological aspects from the Charter (that aren't heavily reflected in the OS anyway), heartwarming compliments and small excerpts of his streams that have been repeated on the internet ad nauseam) and say that they've "haven't done much with it, have just poked around a little, and love weird shit like that" in the same post never fail to confuse and amaze me. Maybe you can probe with an endoscope next time.
I get that you're trying to feign some sort of respect as to look like a respectable oldbie from ye olden golden days that never really existed, but while Alec has been able to create a working and federating backend with a networking stack written in Jakt and everything needed for a web backend, Revolver, albeit a project of a bigger scale and which hopefully doesn't do things like dumping all the federated objects in one folder and praying the instance doesn't grow big enough for the folder to explode, that doesn't involve reimplementing the network stack or net/http (i heard the kv store is from scratch), has been in development for years and has only so far been able to serve media and display a public timeline (tell me if there's more), even considering lucre. Instead you decided to disregard the entire project for having a Discord server and relying on an experimental language (less experimental than HolyC) that happens to transpile to C++ (god forbid a new language bootstraps!).
> if it were a little easier to get a listing of a TempleOS program and post it somewhere, would you see people showing people their TempleOS programs and talking about them?
There is, and it requires placing the bicycle on top of a flywheel attached to a motor, which Terry did all the time. You see him using the VMWare GUI to mount the partition and pull and push files all the time in his videos. Not only that but you can also export folders as ISOs and share them - HolyC is not apljk and it's not possible to just paste entire projects as text especially when considering DolDoc, which is binary data. It's just that nobody cares about developing on TempleOS. Also, it's not like awk scripts or small fragments of shell scripts do much more than automating some handwork. You could've used Iversonian languages as a much better example, as those languages were designed to be able to express entire algorithms as a scribble on a chalkboard.
I am full of bullshit and you should not read what I have written. Having read it, you should ignore it. You don't have to listen to this shit from some rando on the internet.
I had a friend that was giving out public access Plan 9 shells. I asked him about security concerns and he said "If I manage to get a script kiddie to learn Plan 9, I've already won."
@crunklord420@Inginsub@bara@cassidyclown@nroot@p@mint the real question is with templeos users how exactly do they go about collecting the data in the first place? You know since its basically impenitrable to cia assets and shit.