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ExDOS is developed by Omar, “almost 14 years old”

exdos.eu.pn

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Re: ExDOS is developed by Omar, “almost 14 years old”

#31

Post by 101914 »

na85 wrote: post #8
101914 wrote: post #6

Muzzam's site: http://alotware.hol.es "Q: Why did you choose Assembly? A: It is easy, simple, and the language of real programmers." Will he still believe this when he's older? I hope so. Because it is the truth.

But don't real programmers use a magnetized needle and a steady hand?

I don't know. It is a silly term.

However I would be willing to bet you are using a bootloader and a kernel written by people who are comfortable with assembly language. Call them real programmers or something else.

Re: ExDOS is developed by Omar, “almost 14 years old”

#32

Post by camgunz »

[deleted] wrote: post #29

[deleted]

There's a difference between something you are (race, age, sexual orientation, gender) and something you choose to do (donate to a political organization, become a cop). It's very different to discriminate against someone for something they can't control vs. something they can.

Re: ExDOS is developed by Omar, “almost 14 years old”

#34

Post by trsohmers »

elliotec wrote: post #30
trsohmers wrote: post #27

This is anecdotal, but when I was his age and getting into the "real" tech world (and getting my work recognized), I really disliked my age being made a big deal. A big influence on my own view (and I think many others in this community) of being a "hacker" was Steven Levy's "Hacker Ethic", which specifically said: "Hackers should be judged by their hacking, not criteria such as degrees, age, race, sex, or position"…

Sure, but it's impressive nonetheless. A 14 year old kid is building an operating system. What was I doing at 14? I was not building operating systems, thats for sure.

That's not the point... by bringing up age as an important factor, you are then discounting the work. Personally, I would rather have my work valued the same way if I was 14 or 64...

In the case of my current work, I would say I have put the same amount of time into learning and working as people twice my age (Though I guess that means I haven't had much of a life otherwsise, heh). Regardless of my age, I think my work should stand on its own against anything that currently exists. If you add an age qualifier, it does feel insulting (at least for me).

I should also mention that I have used my age to my advantage in some cases, but I strongly dislike people who use it as their main selling point, such as when people brag about being a "young startup founder" etc.

Re: ExDOS is developed by Omar, “almost 14 years old”

#35

Post by RodgerTheGreat »

chetanahuja wrote: post #24

Regarding learning assembly, I'm beginning to come to the view that it's in fact the best way to teach the first course in programming to kids. They don't come with any preconceived notions of what programming should look like and given an explicit, visual model of the computer, they quickly learn the small number of operations to write programs. More over, once they learn to do LDA A ADD TWO STA A DAT TWO 2 in C or…

I've had some success teaching middle schoolers with Chip8 and a structured assembler: http://johnearnest.github.io/Octo/

Re: ExDOS is developed by Omar, “almost 14 years old”

#36

Post by mikaraento »

camgunz wrote: post #32
[deleted] wrote: post #29

[deleted]

There's a difference between something you are (race, age, sexual orientation, gender) and something you choose to do (donate to a political organization, become a cop). It's very different to discriminate against someone for something they can't control vs. something they can.

Having a political view or religious belief is almost synonymous with acting on that - participating in the political process or your religious community. (Though you shouldn't be doing these at work).

To be uncharitable, you are taking an unreasonably narrow view because you disagree with Eich (I do too), but like with freedom of speech it's all about the case when you do disagree.

Re: ExDOS is developed by Omar, “almost 14 years old”

#37

Post by [deleted] »

camgunz wrote: post #32
[deleted] wrote: post #29

[deleted]

There's a difference between something you are (race, age, sexual orientation, gender) and something you choose to do (donate to a political organization, become a cop). It's very different to discriminate against someone for something they can't control vs. something they can.

[deleted]

Re: ExDOS is developed by Omar, “almost 14 years old”

#38

Post by riffraff »

wtallis wrote: post #33
[deleted] wrote: post #29

[deleted]

The kerfuffle about Brendan Eich was a direct result of him not being in a hacker role anymore.

how is that the case?

Had he donated money in the middle of writing a while loop people would have said "ah well, but he's was working as a programmer"?

Such things happen regardless of the role, the role just make them more relevant. There was a recent case (I'd rather not be specific, but about a month ago) in which people asked for a dev to leave open source project cause of his opinions.

Sadly, I'm not even sure people are all in the wrong for getting their pitchforks out, something that I might discount as "just being too sensitive" might hit too close for other people to accept.

Re: ExDOS is developed by Omar, “almost 14 years old”

#39

Post by userbinator »

chetanahuja wrote: post #24

Regarding learning assembly, I'm beginning to come to the view that it's in fact the best way to teach the first course in programming to kids. They don't come with any preconceived notions of what programming should look like and given an explicit, visual model of the computer, they quickly learn the small number of operations to write programs. More over, once they learn to do LDA A ADD TWO STA A DAT TWO 2 in C or…

That looks like 6502 but it doesn't have ADD, only ADC. I prefer the Z80 though. :-)

I also think starting with Asm is a good idea, because it forces you to think about things like data representation (often glossed over in HLLs) and breaking down complex operations into a series of simple steps - something that you have to internalise effectively to become good at programming. If there is time for it, going one step lower to logic gates would be even better to dispel the "magic" and see that CPUs are actually very conceptually simple and logical machines.

Of course to become productive they should move to a HLL and learn the higher-level organisation (functions/procedures, objects, ...) but I agree that the basics are important to understand first.

This is a book I strongly recommend, it's definitely written at a level readable for kids and young adults:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code:_The_Hidden_Language_of_C...

Re: ExDOS is developed by Omar, “almost 14 years old”

#40

Post by dang »

[deleted] wrote: post #29

[deleted]

Detached from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10046119 and marked off topic.

Edit: The comment was off-topic because it went on a flamebait tangent. The topic at hand is an operating system project. Given the context, it's natural to talk about age and precocity too. But "Now it even matters what your political and religious views are [...] Brendan Eich [...]" is wildly off-topic, and exactly the sort of generic ideological tangent that commenters here need to avoid, for two reasons: (1) it's generic, so leads to unsubstantive threads, and (2) it's flammable, so leads to uncivil ones.

That doesn't mean we think you were trolling or intentionally derailing or deserve to be banned or anything like that.

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