urbit

For all Yarvin waxes on about how a technocratic dictator should run things, so it would run more efficiently like a company rather than a bureaucracy, his own company seems like a dumpster fire. If you want our countries to be ran like Urbit, count me out. Doesn't matter if I'm called a "duke" in your "digital feudalism."[0] [0] https://github.com/cgyarvin/urbit/blob/6ac688960687aa9c89d4d...

> genius that is ahead of its time ...for anyone who hasn't seen the hoon programming language, take a look (the top is all comments, scroll down a bit); I'll wait: https://github.com/cgyarvin/urbit/blob/master/aug/les/arvo/h... I submit that the line between genius and insanity is sometimes so fine as to be invisible.

I found this after coming up with my own #spokenDSL for binary at https://github.com/ttobbec/rubble (pt-BR). I found mental math became a lot easier after practicing it a little bit. Might be a good way to teach kids binary. Tell them nothing about bases, conversions, or anything, just give them decimal numbers with a different name, wait for the phonetic patterns to take hold, then show them what's behind it. Urbit's Hoon also takes the approach of coming up with phonetics for ASCII symbols, which I find great. https://github.com/cgyarvin/urbit/blob/master/doc/book/3-syn...

For a toy project of mine, I needed a way to encode small programs to send around. I originally wrote a interpreter for the MIPS instruction set, but then I encountered Urbit's functional machine language, "nock", and switched right over to that. It ended up being a much much simpler interpreter with more compact program encodings and a lot fewer arbitrary-feeling decisions involved. Nock also turns out to be a really straightforward compile target for lisp-like languages. Nock is confusing to approach, but it is really very clever. I would recommend learning it if you are in the mood for a puzzle! Nock: https://github.com/cgyarvin/urbit/blob/master/doc/book/1-noc... My project's nock VM: https://github.com/PeterReid/hoplight/tree/master/vm

The language designer must be a fan of writing assembly language, combined with some LISPy syntax, or something... that's the closest analogy I can think of from looking at it. Maybe it requires some IDE type of editor to make it comprehensible. From the authors: Its syntax is entirely novel and initially quite frightening. [...] If I can summarize Hoon's goal, it's to be the C of functional programming. [...] On the other hand, the apparent complexity of Hoon is very high. When you open a Hoon file, you are confronted with an enormous avalanche of barely structured line noise. Again this reminds us of C, which makes no attempt at the kind of abstract prettiness we expect from a Pascal or a Haskell. Learning Hoon involves learning nearly 100 ASCII digraph "runes." Is this a hars

I find the original blog posts [1] a really interesting read. Nowadays Urbit is indeed full of buzzwords, “your personal cloud computer” and the like. But initially, Urbit was this [2]: > Urbit is a new programming and execution environment designed from scratch. Any resemblance to existing languages or operating systems is coincidental, cosmetic, or inevitable. It was based on this idea: suppose that a different civilization (Martians specifically) had invented computing long before humans. Then by now they would have perfected it. What would their system look like? Urbit is an attempt to rethink computing without the bias of human research and our current intuition. At the heart of Urbit is Nock, a “functional assembly language”. Zero is intentionally used to denote “true” to defy programmer intuition. [1]: https://moronlab.blogspot.com

There is what amounts to a direct claim of purposeful obfuscation here: https://github.com/cgyarvin/urbit/blob/master/doc/book/1-noc... > We should note that in Nock and Hoon, 0 (pronounced "yes") is true, and 1 ("no") is false. Why? It's fresh, it's different, it's new. And it's annoying. And it keeps you on your toes. And it's also just intuitively right.

No. I did a project on Urbit for an OS course. It is deliberately obfuscated. For example, take the specification of Nock, the lisp-like "assembly code": https://github.com/cgyarvin/urbit/blob/master/doc/book/1-noc... The symbol evaluation is designed to take whoever is trying to program in Nock in circles around the specification. It makes even the most basic operations unnecessarily verbose and hard to memorize. To increment a number, you must put it adjacent to the expression [4 0 1]. So 42 [4 0 1] evaluates to 43, after several steps. There is no reason that an "assembly code" should have a decrement operator that must be evaluated more than once in order to get to the final expression. Hoon, the "high-level" langauge is worse. A function to decrement an input by one is specified by the expression: (a=. =+(b=0 |-(?:(=(a +(b)) b $(b +(

This reminds me of Urbit: https://github.com/cgyarvin/urbit Which is at least as weird, more serious, further along, and orders of magnitude more ambitious.

That shit be old, man. Well, not the code... the blog. Lesson 1: your research project is not an open-source project. Until it's done. Lesson 2: extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. That said, if you want to see some very odd-looking code: https://github.com/cgyarvin/urbit/blob/master/jupiter/sys/20... Scroll down to the RSA implementation around line 2500. You won't learn anything. And why does a self-compiling compiler need an RSA implementation, anyway?

> Just link me to your "pure functional operating system" already, or I'm calling troll-post. Moldbug's system: https://github.com/cgyarvin/urbit/ Its blog: http://moronlab.blogspot.com/