This guy doesn’t seem to understand the difference between “good” and “useful.”
I guess the same personality quirks that make a person obsessive and energetic enough to create a complete emulated machine, compiler, and OS also tend to make a person disconnected, lonely, and unrealistic.
I’d never try to dissuade anyone from advocating for leaner, meaner hardware and software, but the “bloat” we all think we understand usually turns out to be “features that were added for what looked like pretty good reasons at the time.” You could define “bloat” as “features that I never seem to use.”
Geri seems to refer to virtual memory, for example, as “bloatwareish.” It’s a bunch of complexity, no doubt, and useful computer systems can work without it, sure. But from a higher-level point of view, the feature is, like everything else in software, a simplifying abstraction. It actually leads to more efficient assignment of resources if they’re scarce, and it does so while freeing up engineering time and effort, which is what really seems to be in chronically short supply.
I’m sure Geri understands all that, he’s just weighs his priorities very differently from most of us. His “bloat” is not my “bloat.”
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Subleq is a OISC, a language with only a single command. It lacks the most basic features of programming languages
To be fair, any machine code instruction set used by any computer ever made “lacks the most basic features of programming languages”, which is why these days the main use for machine code is writing compilers for more usable languages.
And actually that’s what this guy did, too–he used SUBLEQ code to write a C compiler, and the rest of the OS is written in C.
He needs a sticker on his computer that reads, “This machine kills imperialists.”
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Oh, I watched a movie where that sort of happens by accident. As a migraneur it creeped me out more than any other movie I have ever seen… the part where his brain is pulsing on the subway steps and the doors open and all the people stampede downwards… OK, now I’m creeped out again.
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