Back in February, we reported on the promotion of the previous Executive Director of Worldwide Marketing & Product Strategy, Peter Balyta, to president of TI Education. At T^3 2014 in Las Vegas, we had several opportunities to interact with Dr. Balyta, and he reiterated his mission to work with the community as well as to encourage programming wherever it intersects with and enhances TI's mission. Dr. Balyta generously spoke to me this past Friday, answering questions about the present and future of TI's technology, its role in promoting programming and STEM, and his thoughts on the calculator enthusiast community. I was very pleased with what he had to say, and the fact that the following 4,000-word transcript is an edited and abridged version of our conversation (!) should belie the depth of our discussion.

If you lack the time or patience to read the full interview, a few important quotes are worth your time. For example:

Dr. Balyta spoke at length about TI's educational mission with its graphing calculators, including the classroom material and activities and professional development that it offers. We touched on the ever-popular STEM Behind Hollywood program, including whether that program might feasibly find a home on the TI-84+CSE. Perhaps most importantly to the community, Dr. Balyta discussed his views on the value of the community to TI (and vice versa), and how we can continue to build a close positive relationship in the future. I thank Dr. Balyta once again for his time, and I'll look forward to continuing to liaise between Cemetech, the community, and TI Education in the future on the behalf of our many skilled and passionate programmers, students, and teachers.

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Christopher: Thank you for taking the time to speak with me today. For anyone who didn't read that brief biopic I wrote when you were promoted to president, do you mind introducing yourself in a few words?
Peter: Sure! I'm Peter Balyta, and I have the privilege of leading the Education Technology division of Texas Instruments. Before stepping into this role, I had the opportunity to lead our worldwide marketing and product strategy teams, and prior to that I spend time in Shanghai and France for a few years, but basically spent most of my career focused on North America. I'm now happy to have the worldwide view again as leader of a wonderful organization.
Christopher: And you also have an academic and research background.
Peter: Yes, I have a PhD from McGill University, a Masters degree in mathematics from Concordia University, an MBA from the University of Texas, and I earned my undergrad degree at McGill as well.

Christopher: Do you feel that that helped you in your many roles at TI Education?
Peter: I think so. It certainly helped me develop a deeper understanding of mathematics and what teachers and students are struggling with in the classroom. I had the opportunity of taking physics classes where some phenomena were not very easy to visualize, and now with technology being able to visualize those concepts, it's incredible to see how the appropriate use of technology can help teachers and students with in math and science. It helped me get a better perspective of what's going on, and to reach out to the research community (as I often do) around questions that we might be struggling with, getting different perspectives, getting a deeper customer understanding around the world. In my early research, I had supervisors from around the world, from the US, Canada, and France, and early on that gave me different perspectives. At TI, [my mathematics and research experience] was helpful in working with the mathematicians we have here. And while I'm not a programmer, I have a programming background; I worked with things like FORTRAN, PASCAL, and early BASIC programming. This helps me understand issues and optimizations that come up.

Christopher: You mentioned that one of the things that excites you about the educational technology these days is visualizing things. As you said, Dale Philbrick has been very accommodating and patient in answering our questions. He talked to me briefly at T^3 2014 about what's next with professional development and the TI-84 Plus C Silver Edition and TI-Nspire. What do you find particularly exciting about those two main calculator lines?
Peter: We really have two different customer bases. We have some people who are in love with the TI-84 Plus product line, truly love the product, and have built programs and tons of curriculum materials and assessments around those products. We have new textbooks that are not even out yet that are integrating the TI-84 Plus with and without color, so we are confident that that platform will continue to be valued by educators for quite a long time. And I am sometimes asked, "So does that mean they don't like the TI-Nspire?" I believe the answer to that is "absolutely not:" it's not that they don't like the TI-Nspire or any other options out there, it's that they love the TI-84 Plus platform. We're committed to supporting that not only with the platform itself, but with the material and professional development support programs we have in place. And obviously we hear a lot about the new standards [including the Common Core and others] in the US, but there are new standards around the world, and our goal is less to say what those standards are than to work with the teachers and educational leaders to help them be successful in their implementation. For really going deeply into the concepts, the TI-Nspire is the best: it combines interactive geometry, dynamic statistics, data modeling and collection, CAS, into one platform. I'm very excited about the TI-Nspire platform, and we're seeing many educators excited as well, but we recognize that we have two "hero" platforms here, and we're committed to supporting them, as you've seen at T^3 and other customers will see at NCTM and other events around the world.

Christopher: And you're going to be unveiling the new STEM Behind Hollywood program at that conference as well, correct?
Peter: I don't know the exact timing, but I can say that we will be unveiling some pretty cool stuff around STEM Behind Hollywood; I know we've received a lot of positive feedback around parts of that program, like the Zombie Apocalypse, as you heard at T^3. When I first started teaching and then when I started working at TI, I never really thought zombies would be in the classrooms, with students not even realizing that they're dealing with some pretty core math and science concepts while having fun. Definitely you'll see more of that and you'll see some exciting new stuff. If you or your followers take a look at our website, you'll already see some new stuff that's just recently been posted getting ready for NCTM.

Christopher: Do you see any of the STEM Behind Hollywood program material getting onto the TI-84 Plus series, or do you think the difference in capabilities from the TI-Nspire makes that infeasible?
Peter: No, I do think it's possible. When we look at the activities, a lot involves manipulation and graphing of data, regression of data; depending on the age, level curve fitting or more advanced analysis. I think our TI-84 Plus line is definitely capable of doing that, though of course I struggle to see how the rich graphical portion would look on the grayscale calculators. On the color [TI-84 Plus C Silver Edition], I think anything is possible. Now, we don't like to do things completely on our own, if the community could help us see what that could look like, we would certainly welcome the opportunity.

Christopher: That was going to be my next question, so thank you for that. Shifting gears a little bit, it seems to us that officially or unofficially, TI is moving away from the 68k [TI-89 and TI-92] series. I know that many of my colleagues studying engineering as students or professionals use or used those calculators. Do you think the TI-Nspire CX CAS is a drop-in replacement for people who used the TI-89 Titanium, and/or do you think that just the way demand caused the TI-84 Plus C Silver Edition to be created, that there might be some TI-89 C Titanium Edition in future.
Peter: Our official position regarding comments on future development is the same: we can't comment on product plans and product roadmaps, but to talk a little bit about that, we have seen a lot of customers transition to the TI-Nspire CAS. That was certainly our intention in the beginning, to have users of different Computer Algebra Systems, including our own, look at the Nspire and see the possibilities of the Nspire platform, including multiple representations, linking the CAS with other types of objects. We do continue to have a strong following around especially the TI-89, not so much the TI-92, and I do anticipate that continuing. One of the things we're very proud about here at TI and that we're known for is the trust from our userbase. We value that trust and we look at an investment in TI [technology] as a long-term investment, so I think our customers should continue to see that.

Christopher: Let's get something of an awkward question out of the way. I'm sure you're no stranger to the question of why TI's devices (especially the TI-83+/84+ series) cost so much more than the sum of their parts. I always answer that it's a combination of the effort TI expends on professional development for teachers, activities for students, OS upgrades, and interactions with textbook writers to support the devices accounts, and that all of that accounts for the difference between the hardware cost and what the customer pays. What would your answer to that question be?
Peter: Well, first I would congratulate you for getting that exactly right. [laughter] When we look at the products out there today, often we see the price point continuing to go up. Rather than ask why the prices of a certain product are going down, I think that if you look at it, you'll see that it's held pretty stable over the years, and we've worked to keep it that way. And during that time, we've known that our customers look to TI as not just a product provider. They look to us as a solutions provider, and that includes the things you talked about there: we work really hard to provide the content, the world-class professional development, and customer support, that is something we strive for. We continue to invest in that area, and people look to us as a total solution, they trust our purpose-built technology, and we work hard to deliver on that trust and keep that trust strong.
Christopher: So to summarize, when you're buying a TI calculator, you're not paying for the calculator, you're also paying for the complete solution behind it.
Peter: Absolutely.

Christopher: That makes sense. Let's see. So as we've spoken about, the TI-84 Plus C Silver Edition seems to be very well received. I spoke to a number of teachers at T^3 2014 who have used it in the classroom and have been quite pleased with its capabilities so far. On the technical side of things, some in the community have criticized the TI-84+CSE as basically being a new screen attached to the old TI-84 Plus hardware and therefore bemoan the performance issues that can result from that. And I think that might be something that teachers have seen into in a small way as well: a few of the teachers I spoke to expressed frustration that, for example, graphing is slower than on the old calculator simply because there are more columns of Y values to compute and more pixels to paint. I know that you don't comment on future product lines, but I'll ask anyway and you're welcome to not answer...
Peter: Thank you.
Christopher: ...do you have any plans to upgrade the TI-84 Plus C Silver Edition line with an ez80 processor, which we (looking at the technical side of things) know would work with the existing operating system and programs and wouldn't break any compatibility, and will allow our programs of course and the math features as well to run much faster. If you can't speak about such things, then in broad terms, how do you feel about the hardware capabilities of the color calculator?
Peter: Let me address that starting from the very beginning. We are pleased with the reaction of our customers to the TI-84 Plus C Silver Edition, and we got more validation of that at T^3 and prior to that at other conferences around the world, and we anticipate hearing similar reations at NCTM. Now, we haven't heard too many performance issues from average teachers or even early-adopting teachers, so that hasn't become an issue. Of course, we are aware of opportunities to improve on that particular product, and Christopher, I do know of some of the issues you've raised on [Cemetech] and some of the bugs that you have brought up with Dale and Anthony. I can't speak to each of those issues, but I can say that we are committed to continuing to improve the customer experience on our platform. Now, I will be honest, the priorities for us are what goes on in the classroom, and those are non-negotiable versus with other things.
Christopher: Of course
Peter: Now, what you guys do is extremely valuable as well, whether it's programming or just showing what's possible. I refer to it as "extending the capability" of our platforms. That is very helpful for us to see what else can be done today and what should we be thinking about tomorrow. While I can't comment specifically on any roadmap plans and especially not what the TI-84 Plus C Silver Edition will look like in the future, what I said earlier, that there's an important customer base there, it's one of our two hero product lines, and we're committed to improving the customer experience, and in my mind that includes performance going into the future.
Christopher: Great.
Peter: And off (actually, on) the record, please keep that feedback from the community coming.

Christopher: At Cemetech and hopefully in the community at large, we think graphing calculators are a great STEM tool, as I know you do as well, and of course our focus happens to be on the programming side of STEM. Most of the community leaders got started in their current professions just toying with TI-BASIC on their TI-83 or TI-83 Plus calculators, and needless to say we encourage such experimentation as possible. We encourage people to push the boundaries of what the calculators can do. What do you feel that TI does to support programming and learning programming with the calculators officially, and what, if anything, do you think TI could do in the future to continue to encourage programming on its devices?
Peter: Well, we take partnership (well, not in the legal sense of the word) with the community to really extend our platform, maybe in ways we didn't think about. But in all cases, we see this as a win-win partnership, when we're all focused on creating more value for the teaching and learning experience. Innovation that's done in that way is certainly something we want to continue supporting. We support it in different ways, depending on what the particular innovation is. In some cases we jump in pretty deep; there's no cookie-cutter approach. We're always on the lookout for that, and that's one of the reasons we continue to work with you, and provide you with support, why we want to reach out to you. We very much value that relationship, and I do see even more opportunity in the future. We talked earlier about the complete solution and professional development and customer support, but we're talking more and more about content these days. I think there was a fine line between software and content in the past, but I think that line is blurring. I'm hoping to see innovative programming-slash-content initiatives in the future that we're eager to jump on and support. I think we've shown more of that recently. To be sure, it's a little bit new to us, we've been pretty closed in the past; we're looking to both respect the trust of educators and exam boards and work with the community to extend our platforms in ways that really add value to that teaching and learning process.

Christopher: I think most of the programming that students have done is working on their own and discovering what they can do.
Peter: Ah, yes, let me touch on that. In some parts of the world, programming as part of STEM regardless of whether TI is involved is really taking off, and I'm happy to see that. We're partnering more and more with folks to have kids start programming early on, knowing that all kids could have a platform for programming right there in their hands. They can do it in schools, they can do it at home, on the bus, waiting for lacrosse or soccer, and we're seeing that take off in parts of the world, for example in France. The TI-89 and now the TI-Nspire CAS platform is really taking off as a programming platform, and we try to encourage that wherever we see it. We're starting to see some of that here, and we're excited to recognize that. If you have ideas on how we can encourage that more, let me know.

Christopher: I think at least among the people I know, that's actually been something in the US for quite a while, at least with the TI-84 Plus series. A small minority, certainly, but there has been quite a number of students who have started playing around with the devices, as you say, during lunch or waiting for the bus, and have discovered the joys of programming the devices.
Peter: Yes, and how we scale that is what I'm trying to find out. And the new standards in the US are making it more possible for schools and school districts to offer courses or parts of courses that focus on this. When we heard of schools or districts trying to design new STEM courses, we get involved at every opportunity we can.
Christopher: So would you say you see TI's devices, both with Lua on the TI-Nspire and TI-BASIC on the TI-84 Plus series, as a potential resource that teachers could use to teach programming in the classroom, if there's the demand for that from teachers?
Peter: Absolutely. I started initiatives around programming on the TI-83 Plus when I was leading a school district in Canada, and just last weekend I used a really awesome book [laughter] to help my 12-year-old start to learn about programming a little bit more. I not only think so, but I believe it personally, and I pursue calculator programming at home as well as at work.

Christopher: That's great. From your role as the leader of TI Education, of course your goal is to keep the calculators as powerful teaching and learning devices, and as you say maintain that trust with customers and educators. I appreciate that this is a tricky question: what do you think of the calculator enthusiast community, in terms of both the good and bad qualities that we bring to the devices?
Peter: Over the last few years, as I've been more involved in product strategy and then going into worldwide marketing, I've worked hard to help the organization see that the community can really help us, and that we need to work more closely with the community along the positive lines I've discussed with you, adding value to the products, and I believe that that far outweighs the negatives. Most of the people in the community want to innovate, they want to improve their programming skills, they're vey competitive people, and the vast majority is working on positive innovation. Those are the initiatives that we're excited about. Now, I know that there's always members that want to break things just because they can. We really are not interested in supporting those folks. You mentioned that it's a difficult question, but it's not so much: we know that there's going to be people out there doing that. Our products are designed specifically for education, and if you really want to spend time hacking away at that, really? What good does that bring? Even if you could break something because you could break it, how many people really care? If we reacted by shutting that down - no, we really couldn't, but let's say we work hard and tried, we would lose all the innovation and all the possibility that also come with partnering with the community. I'm hoping that the community leaders, I know you do, and I know many of the leaders that I personally interact with do, get it. I know you guys can't control the community, and I wouldn't ask you to; I think the more visible innovations and successes that achieve the goals programmers are trying to achieve, while adding value to the community, then that will start making the negative noise decrease.
Christopher: And we do appreciate that you mostly see it as a positive, value-added thing. I know there have been incidents in the past, but we really appreciate how you've opened the lines of communication in the last couple of years and reached out to us.
Peter: It goes two ways. We took risks by opening up those lines, but you, and a few of your colleagues have shown us that that was the right call. I know that it really takes both the community and TI to make that work, and I'm pleased with where it's going.

Christopher: We have our tools, our resources for programming, our programs and games, some educational, some not so much. To put you on the spot, what including or on top of what we already have can we do mutually to further each other's educational missions?
Peter: I don't have a very clear answer for you, but what I would like to see are suggested extensions to our platform to help advance your and the community's mission around programming, and help advance us around our mission of improving the teaching and learning of mathematics and science around the world. Now, whatever that is, I'm interested, very interested. If we knew what that was, we would be doing it. Help us see what those things can be: you'll have some ideas, we'll have some ideas, and together we can build them out on our future product plans, or you can build them out as programs and eventually get those built into the roadmaps. I don't think innovation has to start in one place all the time.

Christopher: Thank you, that's exactly what I was hoping to hear. Arguably most importantly, although you've already answered this, speak directly to the community of hackers (in the positive sense) and programmers who are enthusiastic about graphing calculators, especially your graphing calculators. As enthusiasts working with powerful teaching and programming, what should they know?
Peter: We're excited about partnering with them, and we see the community as one of the best ways of extending the capabilities of our platform. Just to be clear, we are obviously interested in collaborating with you, the community, in ways that extend the platform in very positive ways that help improve the teaching of math and science. We see tremendous value in collaborating with the community, today and in the future.
Christopher: Is there anything else I missed that we should discuss?
Peter: I wanted to make sure we touched on professional development and other important aspects of our mission, but you sort of led me in there. I always like customers of all types to know that any large-scale adoption of a tool must be supported by strong professional development. Some of that comes in the form of books; you've created some. Some are in the form of support programs, like your website, and for us, for teachers and schools, that of course that looks a little differently. I can't overemphasize the importance of professional development, especially today.
Christopher: Thank you very much for taking the time to talk with me, and I look forward to speaking to you again soon!
Peter: Thank you as well, Christopher; I know you're working hard on your PhD, keeping this community alive, and a bunch of other things. Talk to you soon.

Very informative, I didn't read it all but it seems like the community and TI are headed into a stronger relationship!

You're the worst kind of person, after I spend three hours typing this. Yes, I feel that that's the case, and that we'll continue to build what has already been a fruitful relationship now that Dr. Balyta is at the helm. As he alluded to, please keep the comments, questions, and suggestions coming, and I'll do my best to keep liaising between TI and the community. Of particular note from his questions to us:

:: How can TI scale out getting students excited about programming calculators?
:: What more could the TI-84+CSE and the other calculators include as core features? Are there things we can prototype as programs that might be better as OS features?

Since this seems not to have come up in the chat....the matrix stuff I was talking about would be excellent both with regards to naming and with regards to complex values.

Also, supporting OpenLib and ExecLib from the homescreen would be excellent (as would fixing their lowercase problem).

Wait and see, but in both this interview and Adriweb's interview published at TI-Planet several weeks ago, I see pretty little reason for the TI community to be hopeful (though I'd love to be proved wrong, as usual).
It's really not like TI's counter-productive stance wrt. basic user rights on the Nspire, in stark contrast with the openness of the TI-68k and TI-Z80 series (whose openness was one of the reasons these series came to rule the marketplace), is going to change.

Remember that the contacts between community members and high-level TI executives, bootstrapped three years ago by Philippe Fortin after my harmless OSLauncher for the Nspire series (it was very unreliable and its effect went away with a simple reboot), have yielded pretty little in the way of results on the calculator side (*)

I've lost the equivalent of two full-time days of my free time trying to explain the pitfalls of making the Nspire a closed platform (I once posted the full text at TI-Planet), based on e.g. the PS3 history. Facts quickly proved me right:
* less than a year later, OS 3.2.0.1212 closing the hole in OS 3.1.0.392 yielded a flurry of programs aimed at tampering with the PTT;
* less then a year later, hardware modifications, then nLaunch, then nLaunch CX (several weeks before the exam testing season), made it possible to permanently install arbitrary OS, as long as the calculator is equipped with the right boot2 version.

Yet, TI's policy still hasn't changed, and I don't expect it to change. Again, I'd love to be proved wrong, I'd love to see the lose-lose situation end, but it's very unlikely I will be, for the foreseeable future


*: what I mean by "results on the calculator side" is that both you and Adriweb (for longer) have been making bug reports directly to the dev team for a while, for the TI-Z80 and Nspire series. Adriweb, and now you as well, are discussing with Peter Balyta himself. However, facts show that it's not like such reports yield fixes for important bugs, let alone make the Nspire platform become more open.

Nice interview, Kerm! I guess regardless of what exactly the future holds between TI & the community, it's good to see that we can have a friendly relationship with them and encourage each other.

Obviously they have to be careful about how much encouragement they throw out to programmers like myself who spend the majority of their time making calculator games that students will possibly play in class, but at least they're not shunning us either

Its great to hear that TI, or at least Mr. Balyta, talk about the community as a highly prized partnership. I feel that a business that embraces such an active community such as ours would provide a great example to many others.

@Lionel: you appear to be miffed about the nSpire, but, after reading through this, it appears that, perhaps, you should give a bit more foresight into Mr. Balyta's response to the community's purpose. Yes, he mentions that wasting your time breaking their devices is not exactly something he views as a good point for the community to follow, but he also mentions that, when used for educational advancement, he would back the community. How would you feel that past actions by the community towards the nSpire would "further educational advancement"?

As a matter of fact, TI makes it hard for the community to further educational advancement through native code. On the TI-Z80 and TI-68k series, there was some official documentation about data structures and functions; not so on the Nspire.
Note that I'm one of the few people of the community who performed reverse-engineering in areas which could be used for education (CAS integration), and AFAICT, you're not one of them.

Making games only requires knowing how to access the screen, keyboard and optionally the filesystem, while making native code educational programs in an undocumented system requires consuming undocumented data structures, producing undocumented data structures, and somehow injecting code at various points of the OS. Unsurprisingly, people make games, or do other stuff... or simply shun the overpriced and underpowered Nspire for development.

I would argue that the breadth of programs made for the TI-Nspire through Lua shows that TI is willing to add features to Lua to make it more powerful, but doesn't see programs getting markedly better by exposing native coding. In fact, it was after my tirade against the Nspire and its lack of programmability that TI first reached out to us to let us know that they had added Lua capabilities to the calculator. I'm not proposing that my dissatisfaction with them removing features from a tool many have used to learn programming prompted them to add it back in. On the other hand, the fact that they specifically got in touch with us shows that they had, even at that point, interest in making it known that they are not anti-programming. As you'll note mentioned several times in my interview, TI takes the trust teachers and testing boards have for their products very seriously, and allowing arbitrary native code on the TI-Nspire would potentially compromise that trust for very little benefit to them.

And while I have the utmost respect for your and Extended's skills in getting the CAS OS to run on the non-CAS devices, you're proving exactly why TI doesn't want to allow native code execution. You took the ability to run native code and used it to completely circumvent the fact that teachers and testing boards expect calculators not labelled "CAS" to expressly not have a CAS. It seems to me that refraining from trying to not only enhance the device, but also exploit it, is proving exactly why TI shouldn't trust the community with native code capabilities. By all means show off your technical prowess with private code to turn a CX into a CX CAS, and bask in the prowess of achieving that goal, but by releasing that into the wild you of course force TI to fight back so that high school teachers and ACT proctors don't start complaining that TI-Nspire CXs can be hacked to run CASes, subsequently ban the devices, and impact TI's bottom line.

Edit: A side note: I'm riding a fine line here, because I also think that creating a decent CAS on the TI-84+/TI-84+CSE would be a holy grail of efficient C/ASM programming. However, I would make it very clear that such a CAS was running, and I would not try to circumvent TestGuard to make such a hypothetical CAS able to run on exams.

If you come to T^3 some time, I think you'd be amazed at the range of educational programs written in Lua. I've seen programs that work with classroom-build sensors to determine the color of fluids, programs that simulate rocket propulsion to help students understand attitude control in space, and a great deal more.

As a retail employee who has to sell these calculators every year to college students- and high school students, - none of my fellow employees or the shoppers know about TI's commitment. The conversation just goes something like this:



It's a bummer I didn't think about it until now but I'd love to see TI make an effort to educate the companies that sell their product about this view.

That's an excellent point. Since Peter asked us for solutions instead of just problems, speaking from a retail perspective, what do you think would best help employees not only know this, but believe it? I could see some employees being skeptical if TI just says "hey, we do all this stuff", but I'm not sure what the solution is to make employees convinced that TI actually puts a lot of the profits into professional development, classroom activities, gratis hardware for poor school districts (which I remember coming up at one point but is not mentioned above), and so on.

It's more partnering with the stores. Usually there's a yearly quiz for the electronics employees that covers stuff like iPads, Service Plans, TV, etc. If TI could partner up and get in on that training quiz, that'd be a huge step. Secondly, representatives. Sony, Nintendo, Google, Microsoft, Samsung, Apple, Bose and likely a few others all send out reps to check the product displays and presentation and answer questions every few months; Samsung checks the TVs, tablets; Sony, Playstation, TV; Microsoft, Xbox & their OS software and sometimes the laptops. But that's also a huge investment on the employee front. One corporation in particular has a retail employee facing website that has quizzes for points and gives out tiered rewards. So, creating a retail employee web front would help ease the requirement for representatives. But I'll definitely apply for the job if they need some!

They simply see it wrong. Native code makes it possible to do the same thing but faster and therefore easier on the batteries, more advanced things for the same power consumption, or simply such basic programming stuff as file I/O, given that TI's emasculated Lua can't do it.


It was indeed after your tirade, but not because of it, as it was before several of those who are currently TI-Planet (semi-)staff seriously tipped TI about you. Not because of OSLauncher either, it was released in the same timeframe, which means development had already occurred since several months earlier. It probably was because of third-party native code, though - more than three years after the initial market availability of the Nspire, they suddenly realized the need for something official which would be better than a crippled BASIC which cannot even draw pixels or read from the keyboard...
Lua programming was discovered by Goplat (IIRC) in OS 3.0.1.1753 right after the release, and TI's announcement was about two months later, so it was just about time to announce something that everybody already knew...


As you're aware, HP and Casio tend to see things differently, without impact on exam acceptance.
critor and I showed, and publicized, that modified firmware upgrades are allowed on the Prime without any kind of decryption / re-encryption, resigning or even checksum updates - so arbitrary firmware upgrades are very likely to be allowed.
The Prizm has support for native code add-ons. Yourself used to be interested in the Prizm, but then went back to the tried and true (and far more widespread) TI-Z80 series (not meant as a criticism, even though some in the Casio community do; it's just a fact).


You, and unfortunately far too many people in the community, have it backwards. TI is trying to lock the Nspire down no matter what (they didn't for the TI-Z80 and TI-68k series), and as shown by the history of computer science (common sense, if you will), by doing so, they're creating a lose-lose situation, making it harder than necessary to make the stuff they want to happen, and raising the likelihood of occurrence of things they don't want to happen.
Their only protection is that few people deal with the Nspire, and the only way for them to break the defense-attack cycle is to open the platform. Yes, this means making smarter standardized tests which do no longer have silly restrictions disconnected from real-world usage, or reflashing calculators right in the exam testing room, selling calculators at a halved price tag in such a way that pupils can enjoy a calculator during the year and there is a set of calculators dedicated to the exam testing, or yet several other solutions, all of them being saner and more useful to mankind than the status quo.


There's no technical prowess in OSLauncher. The core of OSLauncher is 5 mere statements of C code; uncompressing the ZIP file took far more code lines. Some of the PTTKiller programs released on the day OS 3.2 came out, or the next day, also used less than 10 lines of code...
Ndless, nLaunch / nLaunch CX / nLaunchy, porting Linux, my PoC for native code CAS programming, and in fact pretty much anything on the Nspire, is more advanced than OSLauncher is.


I do have a clue about that (Adriweb tells us, works on Inspired-Lua, and we occasionally write about it on TI-Planet), but Lua improved by native code (say, to route around the TI.Image horror and the inefficient script encoding) would have the power of expanding the feature set beyond a pure teaching (consumption) machine, into something that pupils can use to do fun stuff while raising their skills, or heck, even engineers could want to use instead of some HP calculator models.
Even without Lua / native code interoperability and complementarity (something which Ndless offers), there's huge potential for making the Nspire's Lua less crippled:
* file and terminal I/O (io.*);
* processes and other standard Lua stuff (os.*);
* RS232 I/O, which was originally indirectly available, albeit without support for sending 0x00 characters, but was soon removed by TI; only the "fixprint" third-party team work undoes the damage.
Everything that makes the Nspire a better microcontroller, and therefore a better host for educational projects akin to critor's toyobot and Loulou's TDF89, is good.

The horribly overblown price tags of underpowered calculators, and bullshit pretexts such as "but we're trying to make a quality product" while user forums are contain years-old bug reports for data loss or wrong computation results, are another topic, but no need to beat the dead horse even further. It's not like a discussion such as this one is going to convince anyone of changing one's mind, anyway.