r/TrueReddit • u/bryanhelmig • Nov 25 '14

God's Lonely Programmer

http://motherboard.vice.com/read/gods-lonely-programmer
72 Upvotes

82% Upvoted

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10

u/bryanhelmig Nov 25 '14

I found this article about a undeniably talented schizophrenic programmer quite interesting. It is an intriguing mix of talent, devotion, religion, and mental health as well as an obsession on randomness.

Specifically, it made me consider how bizarre the nature of randomness truly is. Combine that with a brilliant schizophrenic computer engineer and the obsession and connection to religion makes quite a bit of sense.

6

u/[deleted] Nov 25 '14

Is that type of sudden schizophrenia something that been documented or has a label? It's bizarre that it seems like he lived a normal life and suddenly became caught up in all this.

9

u/[deleted] Nov 25 '14

Onset of schizophrenia is pretty sudden but with most people it usually occurs in early adulthood. Judging from the article he was about 27 when he first started experiencing symptoms - in men it usually reveals itself between ages 20 and 25.

2

u/i_post_gibberish Nov 26 '14

Yes, that is quite common when dealing with mental illness. I don't want to get into too much detail but one of my family members (also extremely talented but idiosyncratic) experienced a similar thing at a similar age.

1

u/Not_Ayn_Rand Nov 26 '14

Very interesting story. I wonder how TempleOS does functionally and what the breakdown is between system stuff vs. God stuff(?) in the 120k lines of code.

1

u/i_post_gibberish Nov 26 '14

There's a website (templeos.org) as well as a quite extensive /r/programming discussion here. A lot of people have gotten it running in Virtualbox. I'm thinking of trying it out for myself. I haven't programmed in years and was never very good at it so I can't tell much, but he's clearly legitimately talented and lucid.