TempleOS
TempleOS is a “biblical themed” operating system, implemented by Terry A. Davis (quite the accomplishment for a single person!). No one was surprised when it came to light that Terry suffered from mental illness. Wikipedia describes reception to his work as “sympathetic” which rings true to me.
Co-dfns is a compiler for a subset of Dyalog APL developed by Aaron Hsu, designed to target and run on GPUs. The implementation is notable for its use of vectors to represent trees. While the implementation is extremely terse and largly uncommented, the code is described in detail in Hsu’s doctors thesis, wherein he also claims that the performance and maintainability of the compiler could not be achieved with any language other than APL.
The guy who wrote the software co-dfns seems legit crazy in the manner of Terry Davis of TempleOS fame. I think these people approach computing and programming purely as an art, so that they don’t mind reinventing everything. It art that’s called being original. Most commenters will dismiss projects like these as unpractical because no one else can contribute to them, and indeed I think they are right to heavily value that aspect of development in the present age of open source and quickly evolving technology.
Is the greatest compliment an author can receive to be called “insane”? To produce so original and masterful work that people can but think you were operating outside common sense. Made tremendous sacrifices and took unbounded risk. At least personally whenever I discover some great artist, I don’t think “wow she is so good!” but more along the lines of “who is this person?!”
