I've been staring at this topic for the last few days and mulling what to say in response, because it's a delicate issue. As DrDnar's thinly-veiled reference implies, in my privileged position as one of if not the ambassador of the community to TI Education-USA, heard opinions from several individuals within TI about opinions on the various development efforts within the community. Different people have different personal opinions, as would be true of all individuals, but of course people's opinions carry different weight. However, long before I had the chance to try to fight to get the community more acceptance within TI, and to get more support for our ongoing quest to use calculators as powerful programming tools, I would have been able to guess exactly what would probably happen with an effort like this. You don't need privileged information, clandestine meetings, a crystal ball, or a business relationship to look at what happened with Ndless and the TI-Nspire and extrapolate what could happen to the TI-84 Plus CE.
Right now, we have a great situation: we have a color-screen, ASM and C programmable calculator, with programs that can run quickly in RAM and be up to 64KB. We can store giant chunks of data in Archive, and make some pretty cool games. Porting C programs and games is becoming increasingly feasible with the available toolchain and libraries, which our AGPLv2 proponents (that's a joke, lest anyone have an itch to argue GPL vs. AGPL) can trumpet as open-source. Purely as a long-time hacker of TI's graphing calculators (ie, not a cracker), and separate from anything I've heard from individuals at TI, we have nothing to gain and everything to lose. From a technical standpoint, Flash-stored Apps would be slower. We already have at least one published shell and at least one nearly-completed shell capable of running Archived ASM and BASIC programs, so we can't make an argument about Apps surviving RAM clears. Most importantly, in order to patch support for unsigned Apps into the OS, the members of the community who do so are unequivocably saying "I am willing to modify TI's OS to get what I want." It starts with Apps, but there's a precipitous slope of (1) making the Exact Math engine on the TI-83 Premium CE run on the TI-84 Plus CE, and (2) patching out testing LED-related security features. I'm not ignorant: I know people have already privately succeeded in finding the exploits necessary to do so. I applaud their reverse-engineering skills and their knowledge of the hardware. And as long as they keep those impressive feats to themselves, no harm is done. However, once general knowledge of such exploits is out there, those who have those skills are crossing the line from "I am good at this, but I recognize the dangers of applying my skills to the general public's devices" to "I am willing to accept whatever fallout results from my actions as the price for getting what I want."
I personally feel we've matured past that stage. The TI-Nspire is now a very locked-down platform, with Ndless constantly blocked and updated, and sufficiently controversial that the primary French TI site both denies any involvement in it and has a dedicated section for. Even while I individually don't support the mindset that it embodies (we do what we must to get what we want), I agree that the lack of native (C) programmability is a fatal flaw of the TI-Nspire and something that I don't understand. But we already have full native programmability of the TI-84 Plus CE, so why do something that would endanger that? The weasel-word distinctions of "unofficial" vs. "official", "public" vs. "private", and so on all stinks to me of attempts to justify things that we know deep down are going to cause a backlash.
Finally, to address that last point, I will do what I can to get something official on this, although I'm sure my "enemies" (I use the word jokingly, for those humor- or subtlety-impaired individuals) think I have far more connection with and inside information from TI than I actually do. Above all, the tl;dr of my individual opinion is: be mature.
Edit: I'd like to lobby for a third option in that poll, "Do neither and keep making awesome programs and games with our existing tools and abilities.", to remove the false dichotomy that that poll and its heavily-biasing language forces on its voters.
Right now, we have a great situation: we have a color-screen, ASM and C programmable calculator, with programs that can run quickly in RAM and be up to 64KB. We can store giant chunks of data in Archive, and make some pretty cool games. Porting C programs and games is becoming increasingly feasible with the available toolchain and libraries, which our AGPLv2 proponents (that's a joke, lest anyone have an itch to argue GPL vs. AGPL) can trumpet as open-source. Purely as a long-time hacker of TI's graphing calculators (ie, not a cracker), and separate from anything I've heard from individuals at TI, we have nothing to gain and everything to lose. From a technical standpoint, Flash-stored Apps would be slower. We already have at least one published shell and at least one nearly-completed shell capable of running Archived ASM and BASIC programs, so we can't make an argument about Apps surviving RAM clears. Most importantly, in order to patch support for unsigned Apps into the OS, the members of the community who do so are unequivocably saying "I am willing to modify TI's OS to get what I want." It starts with Apps, but there's a precipitous slope of (1) making the Exact Math engine on the TI-83 Premium CE run on the TI-84 Plus CE, and (2) patching out testing LED-related security features. I'm not ignorant: I know people have already privately succeeded in finding the exploits necessary to do so. I applaud their reverse-engineering skills and their knowledge of the hardware. And as long as they keep those impressive feats to themselves, no harm is done. However, once general knowledge of such exploits is out there, those who have those skills are crossing the line from "I am good at this, but I recognize the dangers of applying my skills to the general public's devices" to "I am willing to accept whatever fallout results from my actions as the price for getting what I want."
I personally feel we've matured past that stage. The TI-Nspire is now a very locked-down platform, with Ndless constantly blocked and updated, and sufficiently controversial that the primary French TI site both denies any involvement in it and has a dedicated section for. Even while I individually don't support the mindset that it embodies (we do what we must to get what we want), I agree that the lack of native (C) programmability is a fatal flaw of the TI-Nspire and something that I don't understand. But we already have full native programmability of the TI-84 Plus CE, so why do something that would endanger that? The weasel-word distinctions of "unofficial" vs. "official", "public" vs. "private", and so on all stinks to me of attempts to justify things that we know deep down are going to cause a backlash.
Finally, to address that last point, I will do what I can to get something official on this, although I'm sure my "enemies" (I use the word jokingly, for those humor- or subtlety-impaired individuals) think I have far more connection with and inside information from TI than I actually do. Above all, the tl;dr of my individual opinion is: be mature.
Edit: I'd like to lobby for a third option in that poll, "Do neither and keep making awesome programs and games with our existing tools and abilities.", to remove the false dichotomy that that poll and its heavily-biasing language forces on its voters.