Brendan wrote:
Once upon a time (around the 1980s I guess) there were all kinds of home computers [...] that encouraged the user to write software by providing simple to use programming languages [..] and full documentation. This created a generation of people that grew up with the idea that it's easy for a child without any programming experience or training to write their own software, and that this can be both fun and rewarding. Sadly this all died [snipped for brevity].
At least part of the idea behind TempleOS was "nostalgia" - a desire to create an environment where programming is fun again. Occasionally, I wonder if all of us (who put up with it) are "less sane" than Terry (who successfully escaped the from what programming has become).
I wonder if that's part of
SpectateSwamp's nuttiness is about, too (warning, NSFW, mostly in the replies to him - WTDWTF is a rather vicious forum). He endlessly extols the virtues of VB5, goto, gosub, and 'noodling' (deliberately writing spaghetti code with no design or even clear goals, just keep hacking until you get something interesting). The result of this on his
Magnum Opus,
Spectate Swamp Desktop Search, needs to be seen to be believed; I
made a sincere attempt to machete my way through that jungle and only got to around line 800 (of 10200+) before giving up. Don't bother with the .Net version - it is the same code, just copypasta-ed to Visual Studio 2005 and then saved, error messages and all.
EDIT: In case you are curious, yes, he's still posting in some of those same threads which he started eight to ten years ago, having been hosted on three different forum platforms and through several changes of physical hosts.
To be fair, some otherwise sane individuals (e.g., David Brin) have expressed a longing to return to that, at least for the sake of teaching children programming. The problem is that 'professional' software development (and later, most FOSS) had already reached the point where ambition has exceeded capacity before then (they were talking about a 'software crisis' as early as 1970, if not earlier), and a whole generation of kids (such as myself) who grew up in the late 1970s and early 1980s with Apple ][s and Commodores jumped into coding with no idea of how deep over our heads we were getting.
Brendan wrote:
I don't really want to talk much about this (and don't really feel it's my place to discuss what is likely behaviour caused by someone's personal medical history); but I can assure you that initially Terry was quite rational.
OK, I didn't get that part. All I heard about was him calling people '<homosexual> <African-American> rapists' (expletives elided for obvious reasons) and such like in response to any and all criticism, which presumably came later.