Well said. Its infuriating the lack of common courtesy and sensitivity that people show in threads about his work.
It seems to me that he would, like most of us would in his situation, want to be judged on the merits of his work, without other people constantly framing in the context of his mental illness.
terry is given the exact opposite of a "free pass." he has created at least eight accounts at this site. all of them are now hellbanned.
The guy learned how to write compilers and operating systems, surely he is capable of learning to stop using that term - at least on this forum.
It is, however, absolutely essential to take into account the person behind a product when evaluating a product. You would never write an essay on the film stylings of Stanley Kubrick or Roman Polanski without fully considering their backgrounds and personality quirks. You would certainly never write about a work of classic literature without first taking into account the context of when the book was written, what life experiences the author had, or what inspired the author to write such a book.
Products like TempleOS should be treated the same.
If someone with a mental illness writes a word salad, it can be dismissed as a word salad, not because the write has mental issues, but becasue the writing is a word salad.
That said, it takes time to read and judge the merits of a writing, and give a limit to our time we all develop heuristics to help us determine to help us avoid wasting time.
It's notable because he writes the software in ways that someone without his condition would not consider. You can't separate the two.
The guidelines already cover this when they say: "Please avoid introducing classic flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say about them."
It is failing to treat someone as a human being. You are ignoring them because you perceive their mental illness to be dangerous. You're failing to make eye contact with him, because you think he is an animal.
The admins on this site need to do a lot of soul searching if they are ok with this. And now I'm hellbanned for speaking up for terry. Fuck you hackernews.
Hellbanning is not failing to treat him like a human being.
If you want to make the argument that there is a good reason consistent with the purpose of the community to excuse conduct in his case that would otherwise merit hellbanning, that might be an argument with merit -- without the argument being made, I don't see it, but it might be there. But, in any case, that's not am argument you've made.
Bear in mind I've run forums with 50,000+ subscribers and was an EFnet and Quakenet IRC op.
We've had years of this already and it's enough. If someone wants to do the work of making a list of threads we've had about it in the past, we can all point to that the next time someone inevitably starts this controversy up again.
I'm not talking about Terry's technical work, of course. That is as on topic as anyone else's.