61–70 of 177 posts
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.
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One example is that they flipped the meaning of 0 and 1 in their new language. >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.
I'll give you that one! It's an old mistake and not very costly in practice, but the intuitive rightness isn't worth the pain in the butt. But the pain in the butt also isn't painful enough to match the difficulty of fixing it. I actually got this bad idea from Unix: !strcmp(), etc. It's certainly easier to overload error codes into a 0=true scheme, although Urbit doesn't actually do that.
Why is it intuitively right?
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.
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…
Hence why geeks and programmers rarely call them by name. See http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/A/ASCII.html .
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I love IPFS, and it's definitely ahead in terms of applicability. IPFS is solving a different problem -- it's a storage network, not a personal server. IPFS is more comparable to Freenet or BitTorrent. Urbit is more comparable to Sandstorm, although of course they're technically very different.
Is Urbit comparable to Ethereum?
Urbit is [de|para|un]-centralized, with each node capable of independent (possibly antagonistic) action.
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"Since even a silent reader will subvocalize..." Actually, no. I don't.
"Subvocalize" has a literal meaning (micro-activation of the vocal cords) which good silent readers avoid. But you're still activating the vocal areas of the brain [0]. If you read much poetry, you'll see that the connection between reading and sound is pretty inseparable. [0] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23223279
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…
http://lars.nocrew.org/dpans/dpans6.htm#6.1
The names are a mix between the visual (* is 'star', and ; is 'semicolon') and the semantic ( is 'not-equals', and ! is 'store'). Some are a mix (+! is 'plus-store').
For a more accessible alternative approach to all this madness see this mirror project https://github.com/tibru/tibru