
Why Davis' TempleOS is better than Torvald's Linux - SwellJoe
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0-dVp542XGk
======
pekk
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.

~~~
dubfan
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.

~~~
cloakandswagger
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.

~~~
throwaway3343
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.

~~~
drivingmenuts
> 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.

~~~
gonzo
Or Theo DeRaat

------
wrs
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.

------
SwellJoe
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.

~~~
gonzo
Kinda like a lispm for C

------
alxbrun
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!

------
101914
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".

~~~
sparkie
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.

~~~
101914
Log file instead of screen.

------
javajosh
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?

~~~
corysama
[http://motherboard.vice.com/read/gods-lonely-
programmer](http://motherboard.vice.com/read/gods-lonely-programmer)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8658283](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8658283)

~~~
SwellJoe
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.

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

~~~
SwellJoe
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.

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

------
jdiez17
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.

~~~
gh02t
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...](http://www.stenyak.com/archives/1208/trick-of-the-day-rendering-
graphics-in-your-terminal/)

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

~~~
dunham
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.

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

~~~
raldi
It's emphatically _not_ an interpreter. It's a just-in-time, line-by-line
compiler.

------
coding4all
Probably the most fascinating OS ever.

------
rb2k_
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...](http://www.reddit.com/r/TempleOS_Official/comments/2pfp2j/thank_you_for_219/cn1bm4l)

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.

~~~
SwellJoe
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.

------
AdmiralAsshat
"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."

~~~
pekk
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?

~~~
Kiro
Turn on "Show dead" and visit
[https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=TempleOS](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.

~~~
Don_
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?

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

------
callesgg
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.

~~~
sparkie
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".

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

~~~
sparkie
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.

~~~
pjmlp
I misunderstood it then.

