[miklevin]

Hi. Levinux creator here. More modern platforms will always offer developers speed-to-productivity advantage, but the platforms themselves are constantly moving targets. If you invest yourself wholly into them, you're caught in the cycle of what Joel Spolsky calls fire-and-motion. But if you also learn a good terminal-oriented old-skool in a way that will work on most (but not all) embedded systems, you'll always have a fallback plan. The short stack is ideally Unix, C, a ubiquitous text editor, and the compiler tool chain. But we're not in an ideal world and I want it to be approachable by newbies. So, Python comes before C for the sake of positive initial experience and movement towards C, and vim is the text editor choice because of the ubiquity. I know tons of arguments can be made different ways, so I'm making a my flavor of Levinux, then making it as spinnable in different ways as possible. Forth versions should be no problem, and I anticipate a node-oriented version and such. But time and imagination constrained as I am, I'll be focusing my tutorials and server recipes on my idea of an newbie-accessible short stack.

[rm445]

Wouldn't it make sense for levinux to ship with a C compiler then? It wouldn't make much difference to the file size and would let people start with C if they wanted to.

(Please correct me if I'm wrong - I just started levinux, ran the initial download, then sshed in and tried 'cc', 'gcc', 'clang', and 'tcc' before giving up).

[miklevin]

The distribution zip is under 20MB. Even with vim, git and Python, it's still just 60MB. The GNU toolchain pushes it much larger, and it's not part of the early education curriculum I'm proposing. C compiling is something I'll be working people to after several positive experiences with Python. Also, it's just one repository command away from being installed, so I figure I'll add it as one of those menu options that you get presented with after startup.