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!

If they're inviting us back, what's the harm in going there?

Hmm.. interesting. But this wouldn't stop me from buying an 'older' TI, for example the z80 calcs, or the 68K calcs to be able to program, and run programs made for them. It is nice to have fun with just an 'old', black and white, simple calc. But if you have to choose between the PRISM or the CX, I guess the PRISM is probably the best(judging on what I heard).

That is the reason that they might not allow games, but well programs(that they approve?).

They were maybe going bankrupt because of all those people who weren't buying there calcs anymore(us ). So they desided to do this, hoping it will save them. And maybe it will, but if we don't buy there calcs because Casio's are better, they better do something EVEN better.

Don't worry, TI will not get bankrupt, the calculator sections is just a little part of everything

Also, how can we trust TI for keeping Lua support for good?  It is very possible they will require paid licenses and/or teacher certificates at any time.  I suggest we don't even take this as a good sign -- who knows if they're just luring us in so we will buy it and shut up, then in OS 3.1 or 4.0 or the like shut us back out?

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...