TI e-mails various community members and puts Lua tool on TI Education website

[DJ Omnimaga]

Texas Instruments has started to contact various TI community members or websites in the past two days, including KermMartian and ticalc.org, about the opening of the TI-Nspire platform to Lua development. This is the e-mail ticalc.org got:

http://www.ticalc.org/archives/news/articles/14/147/147404.html

The Lua information page is located at http://education.ti.com/nspire/scripting

Although we had known for a short while that TI has decided to open the platform more, the fact that the tool is now on their own website makes this even more official. Also, it appears that for now it will remain free, given that it's easily download-able there.

Hopefully this should eventually make Lua programming on the TI-Nspire more popular. Let's hope that TI eventually opens the calculator to ASM or C development and that the Lua development tools remain free.

[apcalc]

Interesting, and nice to see TI beginning to cooperate with the community!

[Munchor]

Did Omnimaga get an email? We're like the most active community developing Lua Oh and TI-Bank!

Either way, it's nice to see TI interested in us and let's hope they allow C and ASM too

[ruler501]

I'm almost scared of this. I think I'm a little too paranoid about this

[Ashbad]

I don't think we got an email (yet).  I wonder if we will, we make the most games, which TI despises... however we're also the most active TI community site on the web.

[DJ Omnimaga]

Did Omnimaga get an email? We're like the most active community developing Lua Oh and TI-Bank!

Either way, it's nice to see TI interested in us and let's hope they allow C and ASM too

Nope, but maybe they doN't know us yet. While we are very active, it doesn't mean they know us much. After all, Detacheds Solution was less active than MaxCoderz and UTI back then, yet it's DS that was affiliated with TI.

[ruler501]

If they don't know us they can't censor us. So thats a good thing

[ben_g]

wait, is TI now releasing official programming tools AND documentation on their own site ?

that's really the last you'd expect from ti

are you sure this isn't a trick?

[Ashbad]

It's not a trick, in any way at all.  TI is giving us candy to follow them, using the old "Come to the dark side, we have cookies!" approach.  I think they expect we make mostly math programs with few or no games.  If so, they're obviously very stupid and they need to hire a fresh brace of new Public Relations staff.

[ruler501]

Its true they are.

I'm going to stay paranoid about here intentions. We can't be sure its not a trap yet. what its a trap for who knows

[Ashbad]

I actually think it's more of a "trap" in the sense that we buy their merchandise over Casio's.  Lua support will bring together a decent amount of engineers for sales as well, as Lua isn't an uncommon language in the Math/research and IT industry.  And who knows, maybe they'll drag in a few teachers as well...

The thing is, I still don't really care how great their Lua support is, all they really had to do to make a public SDK was to edit out some more confidential parts of the company's SDK and package it with cookies and a ton of advertisements and emails (that I would personally send to the recycle bin).

[TIfanx1999]

I'm almost scared of this. I think I'm a little too paranoid about this

^This. Be afraid. Be very afraid. What ARE you up to TI? >-.-<

It should also be noted that TI has not acknowledged TIcalc.org for years, ever since the CD fiasco. So it seem particularly odd to me that they would contact them.

[ruler501]

My paranoia is going up the more I found out about what TI has been doing. I scared they are trying to make us compliant which we will never be. or maybe they are having us develop for lua but then as soon as we have a big game ndless or something they will take it out to appease the teachers. Or they'll change it just enough to break everything we've done

[Ashbad]

I actually think they're being sincere with keeping it free and non-licensed.  However, Lua is very slow and limited compared to Native C or ARM assembly, it's more in comparison with 84+ BASIC versus z80 assembly.  I'd compare original Nspire BASIC to and 84+ Brainfuck interpreter made in BASIC compared to z80 assembly, so you can get even more of an idea of my thoughts

If we attempt Ndless, then all they would have to do is block the stack overflow problem from the Lua interpreter, which would only require either putting an error after something like 32 stack pushes or not allow for recursivity.  On the bright side though, TI's programmers are quite inept and I doubt they know anything about how Lua works aside from how to port the standard interpreter to ARM platforms.

[calcdude84se]

TI doing something that the community appreciates... They haven't done that in a while.
Hopefully this is the start of a new era of friendliness from TI, but perhaps I am just to hopeful