[octotoad]

Sounds like they’re referring to characteristics of TempleOS that may have suited the original goals of the Raspberry Pi, which was to be a tinker-friendly device for audiences like school children.

Some people lament the fact that it simply ended up with a plain, general purpose Unix-like, rather than something more low level and immediately direct (as in, drop you to a BASIC, not necessarily assembler), ala Commodore 64.

The peculiarities of the author aside, a live TempleOS was able to have its running code modified on the fly, and allowed direct low level access to what was under the hood in perhaps a more interesting hacker-ish way than your typical Unix clone/descendant.

[zozbot234]

That's a bit silly, tbh. Dropping you straight into BASIC may be appropriate for an 8-bit computer with a few hundred KiB at most of combined RAM and ROM, but the Raspberry Pi is nothing like that. A *nix system is really the closest analogy, since the development tools for that are only an apt-get away! You even get some BASIC implementations, even though it's not very clear how much those help.

I'd actually like to see a roughly BASIC-like language that's simply a reasonably light syntax-wrapper over, say, Rust. It might make it easy for novices to get into hacking and software dev with a language that doesn't abstract too much away from the actual system - and then transition to a "real" language like Rust later.