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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”

#81

Post by [deleted] »

trsohmers wrote: post #34
elliotec wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wo…

[deleted]

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

#82

Post by nnq »

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 awkward phase of internalizing that '=' is an assignment operator and is different from another operator meant to test equality gets a lot shorter for a beginner.

I'll probably have to thank one of my highschool math teachers for inadvertently helping me skip this phase altogether then :)

He always pestered us to use the "equivalence" operators ⇔ or ≡ (the latter mostly for geometry stuff), and only use the regular equal when you had unambiguous contexts like "Let f(x) = x + 2" or "if x = 5". At the same time I was learning programming (with C++ as my first language...), and I could easily see "=" as being for assignment, since in other contexts you either used something more fancy (like ⇔ or ≡ in math, and "==" in code) or you used explaining words like "let" or "if" to clarify meaning. Though I think it took me a while to get things like `while (x = getch()) { ... }` :)

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

#83

Post by freyr »

teddyh wrote: post #79
jacquesm wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That's not the point... by bringing up age as an important factor, you are then discounting the work. I see it rather the opposite. By mentioning his age the feat becomes all the more impressive.

The feat becomes more impressive, yes, but not the work – i.e. the result. If I want to be a peer among peers and contribute to society on an equal level, I can’t have people going “Ooh, that’s very good for a cripple/child/blind person . When they do that, I can never know if I am actually good enough or if people are only patronizing me.

If you're seeking approval from other people to determine if you're "good enough," you're heading down the wrong path.

Also, this is a ridiculous conversation. The actual work of these teenage wunderkinds is very rarely on par with the work of similarly talented, but more experienced professionals. It's almost always about the feat. And that's okay, because the feat is indicative of future potential.

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

#84

Post by qznc »

byuu wrote: post #23

I'm very happy to see people are still doing this sort of thing! I've always wanted to see something of a truly 'barebones' OS; but one that could at least get you 64-bit mode, OpenGL ES, audio output, USB polling and network connectivity with libc available. Yet not be as complex and large as Linux/BSD. Being able to run a real-time application with no pre-emption, no virtual memory protections, no kernel transition…

It is much less work to tune Linux.

http://electronicdesign.com/embedded/how-boot-linux-under-on...

http://www.makelinux.com/emb/fastboot/

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

#85

Post by nightcracker »

nnq wrote: post #82
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 awkward phase of internalizing that '=' is an assignment operator and is different from another operator meant to test equality gets a lot shorter for a beginner. I'll probably have to thank one of my highschool math teachers for inadvertently helping me skip this phase altogether then :) He always pestered us to use the "equivalence" operators ⇔ or ≡ (the latter mostly for geometry stuff), and only use the re…

I don't agree with your math teacher. ⇔ is not equivalence, it's a symbol for 'if and only if'. The left hand side implies the right hand side, and vice versa.

Writing a * a - b * b ⇔ (a + b)(a - b) doesn't make any sense, because neither the left hand side nor the right hand side are logic statements.

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

#86

Post by dang »

jacquesm wrote: post #55
[deleted] wrote: post #47

[deleted]

Hey Omar, You can flesh out your profile by clicking on your name in the top right, suggest you add a link to your project there. Super neat to see your stuff, keep at it! Jacques

It wasn't Omar, just a troll using multiple accounts in this thread.

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

#87

Post by rodgerd »

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 awkward phase of internalizing that '=' is an assignment operator and is different from another operator meant to test equality gets a lot shorter for a beginner.

Pity language designers don't take the more obvious solution of making their maths-derived operators behave like the language they're drawn from.

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

#88

Post by kriro »

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 talked about the x = x + 2 / x == 0 "problems" with a couple of people during university and it seems there's different levels of problems/irritations people have with the syntax. For me it was mostly a "shrug ok so that's that, don't see the problem" when it came to accidentally using "=" instead of "==". A couple of friends seemed to have mental blockades and often wrote code containing the typical bug of "=" instead of "==" (the hotfix of 1 == a instead of a == 1 helped some).

For me the irritating thing was x = x + 2 since it triggered my math brain which protested and simply said...well that can't be, error. So I guess I did have the exact reverse problem always seeing the assignment as an equality. Thankfully this passes really quickly after you immerse yourself in it for a day.

Of course years later one of the first sentences from our Prolog 101 prof was "so you have been programming for a while now...let me write this down...i = i + 1...someone explain what this does...what would you suppose a (stereotyped) mathematician (that only knows math) would tell me" Kind of made me smile. /offtopic_anecdote

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

#89

Post by frest »

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"…

Regarding ExDOS (or your EyePC), would we be discussing it right now if it weren't for the creator's age? Not to discount this work, but if it had been the side project of a mid-career engineer, it would be a non-story. Not because the work is good or bad, but people simply wouldn't care.

The point being, you benefitted tremendously by your work being judged relative to your age, so it seems disingenuous for you to suggest Omar shouldn't get the same treatment.

I doubt ExDOS or EyePC will be remembered in the annals of history as engineering marvels, but that's irrelevant. They are indicators that the creator has the talent, intellect, and dedication to accomplish a lot in a very short amount of time, and they hint at great potential.

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

#90

Post by aninhumer »

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…

Surely something like Logo has similar advantages (small set of simple instructions) without requiring students to learn about CPUs before they can start? Plus it means they get to draw pictures instead of relatively boring calculations.

And switching to assembly seems like a pretty overkill solution to the = vs == problem.

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