Hello, my fellow peers of the calculator community:

As of yesterday, TI did something we would have never expected them to do: they opened us up to full development rights for Lua programming with decent tools and all. This brings us back into an era of peace with our mortal enemy, Texas Instruments, as they obviously don't squelch us highly skilled programmers and hackers as they used to. However, should we trust them?

Let's go back in time for a minute and look at what they've done to us in the last 3 years. In 2007, the TI-Nspire was released, and the original versions had no programming support whatsoever, lacking even a BASIC language. In 2008, they included Nspire BASIC in later OSes, but by this time half of the community was already fed up, and we dropped into the doldrums of 2008, where little to no calculator development took place. They singlehandedly almost killed us all. In 2009, however, the community picked themselves up and started again, knocking a few chips off their shoulders from previous experiences. By 2010, Ndless was created. And the malicious TI struck again, consistently trying their hardest with their obviously brain-dead programmers to lock us out of C and Assembly development. By 2011, they finally hired decent programmers and were able to lock us out of 3rd party development almost entirely.

Should we trust them now?

On another note, Casio has been turning a blind eye to us lately, and I commend them for that. The Casio fx-CG10/20 Prizm was a huge success amongst programmers in these parts of the web. It already has decent support for C and SH4 assembly programming, putting it leagues above Lua-only programming. With C, we already are in the midst of many other languages coming to fruition -- Qwerty.55 (or fishbot) and z80man have been hard at work making Khavi, a multi-language interpreter framework that is set to support Java and Lua at base release, and by extension JRuby, Jython, and Groovy are also supported. There are rumors concerning the ability to use fully-functional C++ soon via some additions the GCC SDK created by Jonimus, Tari, and others. And, I, lastly, am creating a whole new language, Emerald, for the Prizm. That's a lot more than just Lua. And slow Lua, at that again.

While I cannot make any decisions for you, I just wanted to fill everyone in on my opinion, being that TI obviously doesn't want us doing any significant development on their calculators, while Casio is probably in secret joy we're helping them out a little. My question to you all: Why should we turn to the dark side of limited TI calculator programming, when we can have the infinitely more supremely open-to-third-party-software Casio calculator programming? I personally will never buy a TI calculator again, Lua support thrown together at the last minute to sugarcoat my opinion of the monopoly won't undo the evils they issued on us in the past -- at least in my mind.

Thanks for your time,

Ashbad

EDIT: and, I am interested to hear your opinions as well, feel free to post them below!

TI will probably continue to try to stop Ndless on the Nspire. ExtendeD has started making Ndless 3.0, and I'm not going to be surprised if TI releases yet another OS that does nothing except for blocking it...

Everything TI has done makes sense from a business prespective. They don't hate us and they never did. Your use of term like darkside make it seem like they are pure evil while they in fact have been rather nice. they want control over their calculators and teachers wouldn't have it any other way. If they can't have features like press to test then some teachers would ban their calcs, and that is not an option for TI. Lua allows them to say what API's we have access too but even that is better than casio giving us jack squat for syscalls and headers. TI is giving us docs and an offically supported method to make third party apps, I don't know what more you could ask for.

Lua may be a bit more limited than say C but its quicker to throw an app together and allows TI to give us advanced progamming and keep the control they need to keep teachers happy.

In all this whole TI is evil or has turned its back on us stuff is dumb, in my opinion. They clearly were working towards this for a while and the only thing I'd fault them for is taking this long to get a SDK out.

I disagree that Lua is faster to develop than C. As an interpreted language, it might be slightly faster to go through test/fix iterations of debugging, but I don't think it's markedly faster to code. I'm intrigued that you've been defending TI and the Nspire including the CX despite your work on the PrizmSDK from day 1, despite the lack of interest they've shown towards the community. Their attitude has ranged from apathy to hostility, which as you correctly point out is out of concern for the two groups that dictate the vast, vast majority of their bottom line: teachers and the ETS (the board behind the SSAT, SAT, PSAT, etc). I absolutely understand why their decisions make sense from a business perspective; what I don't agree with is that they are making all their decisions with two eyes firmly fixed on their bottom line. I'm not confident that TI will stick with allowing Lua, either, but we shall see.

After a few games come out, I wouldn't doubt they would require some sort of studio to make programs that required a paid license.

As I've said many times, we have no way of trusting them whatsoever -- they don't care for us at all, and the Lua SDK is simply to shut us up, as it's most likely something that their developers actually used and it wasn't too hard to edit so it's "safe" for us.

In my opinion, they are the evil side in a sense, I lost my respect for the monopoly a while ago and even if they opened up the OS for more powerful languages with more control over the overall hardware, I still will not trust them. Act bad once TI, you lose customers one by one, forever.

Evil is such a strong (and imo immature) term to use for a company that sells calculators. It's hyperbole and fear-mongering, basically. It's not like they sneak in to your house at night and kill you parents. They aren't "evil", they're just looking after their bottom line, which they have every right to do as a company. I'm with Joni on this.

I'm still not trusting them. They still haven't opened OS 3.0.1 to ASM/C development nor stopped blocking Ndless on it. They did a step in the right direction by allowing Lua, but who knows if it's not to sell a SDK and disallow any community tools to generate Lua files for free in the future? After all, back in 1999-2003 the 83+ Flash Debugger SDK was paid.

They are a good business model, and evil may be a strong word, I highly agree. From a businessman's perspective, they're awesome. However, are we businessmen? No, we don't care if they make a few million more greenbacks per quarter or if their stock is on an upwards trend. We're programmers. If we don't like what they do, why should we ever support it? Because they make good money off us?

From a programmer's perspective, they are quite anit-us, and for that we should completely ignore this as good news. Remember, we can't trust them, as Kerm hinted at.

Those of us who own stock in TI do care about their stock going up

I never said you had to support what they do, only that calling them evil is ridiculous. I agree that if you don't agree with what they're doing that you shouldn't support them.

Something I'm wondering about is why they chose to add a 0D compression requirement in 3.0.2, blocking all of our Lua programs, but then give us a method to create 0D-compressed files so that we can use Lua again...

Even from a business perspective, they're overreacting. Maybe a few schools would ban the nspire because it can be programmed for. Maybe. They would also be overreacting though.
When I took my finals, I was the only person in the entire school that had any programs on it useful at a test (Symbolic). There was a bunch of people who used programs as cheat sheets (I did that as well), but most just used their 83 the way they bought it.
My point is, even if the nspire can be programmed for, almost no one will actually do it, so no one needs to care about it either.

good response, I'll give you that .

I personally agree with you, I'm just not gonna support them at all anymore, and it's up to others to follow suit if they want to.

I think a pure focus on one's own bottom line above the needs of others is evil, but that is purely opinion.

Needs? We hardly need programming support. They're not starving us.

I agree you have a point. They're not evil, they're just not for us. I doubt they'll care if we disown them, and we're probably better off. This isn't Darth Vader or something we're discussing.

Two reasons, they most likely intended to do so from the start to reduce file size and it makes it harder for us to view the source to their programs. If they plam to have for pay app like the 83+ series they need to make it so we can't just look at the source. Even if you don't agree with them sell programs for calculators you can't blame them for protecting their code.


Edit: Ashbad, disown them, wtf? Look You may not be happy with how TI handled thing but if it weren't for your TI calc you wouldn't even be here on this site. You most likely owe your love of programming to them. The Prizm is a decent calc but the majority of students will still be getting 83+'s, 84+'s and Nspire's and I personally feel while it may have some short comings the Nspire is a decent calc as well and we now have the oppertunity to do w/e we want with it.

Stallman would.

I'll give you that but even you and Kerm don't open source all your projects either.

None of use would. However, if they sincerely don't want us like they have proved over and over again, why should we still go with them? That's like saying "Oh, you back stabbed me many times in the past, but hey, I suddenly fully trust you now, now that you gave me a bit of trivial candy you might even take away."




It's had nothing but shortcomings for the past 4 years. Just because they want to shut us up now, doesn't mean they suddenly care for us at all. I can't complain about how they were when they made the TI-8x family, but now they are even trying to screw us with that by discontinuing as many non-Nspire models as possible.

EDIT: the word 'trying' perhaps isn't proper. More like they 'are' -- I doubt they're aiming this all just at us, but they are getting us in the process as a bonus.

I don't open source my projects, but I certainly don't charge for my projects, and it has been an extraordinarily rare occasion when someone has asked for code from my projects for reference or routines from my programs for their programs when I have said no. Taking without asking is a totally different story, and royally pisses me off. But this isn't about me, this is about TI's money-grubbing ways.