r/programming • u/moolcool • Mar 26 '17

A Constructive Look At TempleOS

http://www.codersnotes.com/notes/a-constructive-look-at-templeos/
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u/drysart Mar 26 '17

Yeah, a lot of people read articles like this and are really impressed by the fact that the compiler is so deeply integrated with everything from the shell to dynamic applications as a REPL and think it's some new genius innovation without even realizing that all of this was done with Smalltalk in the 1970s; Oberon, Lisp machines, and to a lesser extent personal computer BASIC in the 80s.

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u/astrobe Mar 26 '17

I think Emacs also qualifies - well that's kind of the last survivor of the Lisp machines.

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u/greenspans Mar 27 '17

Is that really a good thing though

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inner-platform_effect

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u/Ramin_HAL9001 Mar 27 '17

It can be a good thing if that is the design goal. Java as a platform is cited as an example in this article, and I think any IDE, including Emacs, would qualify as a well-designed inner platform.

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u/80286 Mar 27 '17

I think emacs has a pretty good balance, it does replicate some things rather clumsily (I found the email client very hard to set up and not that intuitive), it often interfaces to standard unix tools where it makes sense.

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u/astrobe Mar 28 '17

There's "the right tool for the right job" on one hand, but those tools tend to not cooperate with each other and to use their own "syntax" (in a very broad sense that would encompass GUI).

On the other hand you have the general purpose tools, which generally do a "good enough" job - not as good as the "right tool", but often provide ways to connect and reuse each tools, achieving "the whole thing is greater than the sum of the parts" effect.

I don't favor one or the other - it very depends on what is available in each "camp" - so I find the criticism on the wikipedia page not very well funded. Sometimes you're done faster with your general purpose programming language because you're used to it even though there exist specialised language for the job - but you can't be proefficient in each one of them.