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Urbit: an operating function

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Re: Urbit: an operating function

#51

Post by jpt4 »

tptacek wrote: post #46
pcmonk wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Traditional punctuation names suck. "Ampersand", "at sign", "caret"? For a language like hoon where we use a lot of symbols, that gets really tiring. Having one-syllable names for glyphs is really convenient, and they tend to roll of the tongue. Everyone's free to use whatever names they want, of course, we just find these useful. Most people love these once they get used to them. I don't think you can judge syntax b…

This right here is what I mean when I suggest Urbit is unserious. "Green is just yellow and blue. Why do we call it 'green'? That name sucks. From now on, we're going to call it 'yellue'." There's overreaching first-principles boil-the-ocean dorm room rethinking of concepts, and then there's renaming the ASCII characters.

A better analogy would be a modern day SSB [0] proposing a constitutional amendment to officially rename federal offices by their standardized acronyms, e.g. "President of the United States" to "POTUS", "Supreme Court of the United States" to "SCOTUS", etc., especially as this would be an equally superficial distraction from this hypothetical neo-SSB's real goal of replacing all Congressmen with AIs and relocating the capitol to Kansas City.

As it happens, "green" exists linguistically, so one is not compelled to wax artfully about the "yellow-blue blades [of grass] laced in dew". However, it used to be that the only way to talk of "orange" was as "yellow-red" or similar, until the simplifying convention of a new word for a distinct entity took hold.

Edit: Further, Urbit's equivalent of the Sunflower State Congress plan gloms enough together that an atomistically novel domain specific vocabulary is at least as useful.

Edit: As one effectively lay to the many disciplines of the professional field of computation, I use this forum to advertise my continued interest in a critical audit of Urbit. If Keean Schupke and Thomas Lord can probe the depths of Carl Hewitt's ActorScript [1] (the true standard for any so accused "obscurantist" software), then a fortiori Urbit's Anathem barrier [2] can be only semi-impermeable.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simplified_Spelling_Board

[1] http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/5243

[2] https://xkcd.com/483/

Re: Urbit: an operating function

#52

Post by yarvin9 »

tptacek wrote: post #46
pcmonk wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Traditional punctuation names suck. "Ampersand", "at sign", "caret"? For a language like hoon where we use a lot of symbols, that gets really tiring. Having one-syllable names for glyphs is really convenient, and they tend to roll of the tongue. Everyone's free to use whatever names they want, of course, we just find these useful. Most people love these once they get used to them. I don't think you can judge syntax b…

This right here is what I mean when I suggest Urbit is unserious. "Green is just yellow and blue. Why do we call it 'green'? That name sucks. From now on, we're going to call it 'yellue'." There's overreaching first-principles boil-the-ocean dorm room rethinking of concepts, and then there's renaming the ASCII characters.

This definitely counts as a highbrow dismissal!

As I age, I find it harder and harder to remember how easy and natural it is for young people to learn new things: ideas, theories, languages, and yes -- names. Alas, we can't rejuvenate our brains. I know of only one (partial) cure: have your own kids. You'll feel jealous all the time, but it's worth it.

It's painful to admit that I'm probably too old to learn other peoples' new languages. But any new language isn't and can't be designed for 42-year-old silverbacks. It has to be designed for kids -- or at least, people are who are kids now. And believe me, teenagers love this kind of stuff...

[Edit: tptacek, when you edit a comment after posting it, I think it's good etiquette to mark it with an [edit]]?

Re: Urbit: an operating function

#53

Post by mst »

yarvin9 wrote: post #21
jitl wrote: post #11

the concepts expressed in the first section "Obstacles" are interesting and make for good reading, but the implementation strategy in "Definition" are nuts. The authors completely disregard human nature and usability when designing Hoon. Random variable names? Sigils-only syntax? If they want to replace Unix and the Internet, they should remember why Unix won: because it was easy tp get things done. In Urbit new deve…

Apparent usability isn't the same as actual usability. Pretty much everyone who learns Hoon is surprised by how easy it was, which may be a good thing or a bad thing depending. There are about a hundred runes (digraphs) in Hoon, but you mostly see only 10 or 15. Also, they're organized by internal structure (all | runes do the same kind of thing), and most runes are macros which resolve to about 20 built-in forms. It…

Every time I look at Hoon I think "this looks like the same sort of cliff-steep startup followed by 'woah' as vi", but I can never quite get past the cliff as yet.

Re: Urbit: an operating function

#54

Post by yarvin9 »

tptacek wrote: post #44
yarvin9 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We'll call it a terse highbrow dismissal, then. My terse highbrow dismissal: separating the programming environment from the protocol results in serious, pragmatic problems. For instance: protocols specified in English, in which messages are validated by hand and not by a type system.

The notion that Urbit believes it can solve all the problems , rather than tackling a single important problem, is one of the things that makes it unserious to me. The inflexibility of the Internet service model is a serious problem. Poor formal methods for verifying protocols is a serious (albeit not lucrative) problem. Programming languages that make it difficult to express correct programs: serious problem. It is…

At a certain scale, it's often a lot easier to build one system that solves all the problems.

Building a building: hard problem. Building 1/3 of a building: impossible problem. Building a cow: hard problem. Building 1/3 of a cow: impossible problem.

Re: Urbit: an operating function

#55

Post by david-given »

masonicb00m wrote: post #50

Awesome. 'For example, %= sounds like "centis" rather than "percent equals." Since even a silent reader will subvocalize, the length and complexity of the sound is a tax on reading the code.' This is great. Clever how some of the sounds are reminiscent of existing readings.

"Since even a silent reader will subvocalize..."

Actually, no. I don't.

Re: Urbit: an operating function

#56

Post by jpt4 »

KaiserPro wrote: post #47

isnt this basically the same idea as plan 9, but with some more opinions on "decentralised" networks.

To the depths of my familiarity, Urbit is basically the same, to some shade or degree, including but not limited too, the ideas listed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10279931

Re: Urbit: an operating function

#57

Post by colanderman »

mcantelon wrote: post #33
GFK_of_xmaspast wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're both run by unpleasant individuals who like to post their opinions about black people on the internet, the main difference is Mencius Moldbug uses fancier words.

Their opinions about things unrelated to technology are, of course, highly relevant to their technological insight.

Meh, I prefer not to work with bigots. Good to know this fact; I was considering getting involved.

Re: Urbit: an operating function

#58

Post by csense »

pcmonk wrote: post #36
csense wrote: post #31

The architecture is exciting. The problem is that the aesthetics of the tooling seems deliberately designed to alienate new users. For example the whitepaper gives new names to every punctuation symbol! And poking around the repo, there are gems like this: "A...variable name is a random pronounceable three-letter string, sometimes with some vague relationship to its meaning, but usually not..." "Nock, for mysterious…

Traditional punctuation names suck. "Ampersand", "at sign", "caret"? For a language like hoon where we use a lot of symbols, that gets really tiring. Having one-syllable names for glyphs is really convenient, and they tend to roll of the tongue. Everyone's free to use whatever names they want, of course, we just find these useful. Most people love these once they get used to them. I don't think you can judge syntax b…

> For a language like hoon where we use a lot of symbols

Languages with lots of symbols tend to be incredibly difficult to read at first. If you have a programming language where a typical program looks like line noise, it means the programming language is going to likely have a very steep learning curve (because a lot of those operators are probably not going to have their standardized meaning).

Think about Python. A well-written Python program is similar to the pseudocode you would write on a napkin. For a concrete example, look at the whitepaper's definition of I1 in pseudo-code. The "pseudo-Hoon" implementation of I1 looks totally different from the pseudocode, and to even begin to read the Hoon code, I would have to look up the meanings of approximately 10 different operators.

I guess there are two different camps of language design -- the Perl / Ruby / shell camp where having lots of non-standard operators in your syntax is desirable, and the C / Python / Lua camp which prefers a small set of operators with meanings close to their "standard" mathematical ones.

Re: Urbit: an operating function

#59

Post by zorpner »

mcantelon wrote: post #33
GFK_of_xmaspast wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're both run by unpleasant individuals who like to post their opinions about black people on the internet, the main difference is Mencius Moldbug uses fancier words.

Their opinions about things unrelated to technology are, of course, highly relevant to their technological insight.

The idea that technical aptitude and social/humanistic aptitude are orthogonal is bizarre, especially in the context of someone designing something to be used by other people. The intentional obtuseness and unfriendliness of the urbit ecosystem should tell you something.

Re: Urbit: an operating function

#60

Post by xixi77 »

csense wrote: post #31

The architecture is exciting. The problem is that the aesthetics of the tooling seems deliberately designed to alienate new users. For example the whitepaper gives new names to every punctuation symbol! And poking around the repo, there are gems like this: "A...variable name is a random pronounceable three-letter string, sometimes with some vague relationship to its meaning, but usually not..." "Nock, for mysterious…

This has been done before: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/INTERCAL

"The INTERCAL manual gives unusual names to all non-alphanumeric ASCII characters: single and double quotes are "sparks" and "rabbit ears" respectively. (The exception is the ampersand: as the Jargon File states, "what could be sillier?") The assignment operator ... is in INTERCAL a left-arrow, <-, referred to as "gets" and made up of an "angle" and a "worm"."

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