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Urbit: an operating function

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Re: Urbit: an operating function

#91

Post by jpt4 »

lexcorvus wrote: post #86
colanderman wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Unfortunately, at this point bigot is a distinctly Orwellian term. Consider, for example, the statement "Italians are more intelligent than Germans." By itself, this statement can't be bigoted, because it simply represents a possible fact about reality. At worst, it's false, or perhaps simply ill-posed (if, for example, one rejects the notion of quantifying intelligence). It's categorically distinct from things like…

[Disclaimer: The following is a digression into political and rhetorical philosophy. Caveat lector.]

Of course, such a rigorous delineation of denotation and connotation is the mark of a decidedly literal mind, and the neoreactos do laud the socio-linguistic adriotness to see both accident and essence. Thus this appeal to pure dialectical interpretation (which I affirm as my preferable norm) of politically sensitive statements seems vulnerable to attack in ways resonant with their assault on arguments for universal human rights - the ideal which is being discussed is not the practicality which the victor hopes to influence.

Re: Urbit: an operating function

#92

Post by mundo »

yarvin9 wrote: post #78
JoshTriplett wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Traditional punctuation names suck. "Ampersand", "at sign", "caret"? Hence why geeks and programmers rarely call them by name. See http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/A/ASCII.html .

There's a lot of folk workarounds for this problem. They're mostly fine for languages that use ASCII lightly. But it'd be a pretty confusing mess if we applied the "pick something in the jargon file" approach to something like the Hoon syntax. Everyone who's learned our ASCII dictionary, which admittedly is not a whole lot of people, applies it compulsively.

Is the list in the whitepaper correct? It shows in part:

  nap [
  pan ]
  lep (
  pel }
If that's not a typo, using mirrored words for ( and } is downright malicious.

Re: Urbit: an operating function

#93

Post by tptacek »

yarvin9 wrote: post #52
tptacek wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 pe…

FWIW: I wrote the first half of that comment, then 5 minutes later, feeling it was too snarky without explaining itself, added the sentence: "There's overreaching first-principles boil-the-ocean dorm room rethinking of concepts, and then there's renaming the ASCII characters."

I'm a parent of two teenagers, neither of whom seems particularly interested in new names for punctuation.

Re: Urbit: an operating function

#94

Post by yarvin9 »

david-given wrote: post #87
yarvin9 wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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

I'm afraid I'm having a great deal of trouble understanding your point here. > "Subvocalize" has a literal meaning (micro-activation of the vocal cords) which good silent readers avoid. Right; so I'm not subvocalising. > But you're still activating the vocal areas of the brain... Well, sure. I see the symbol 'cat' and both the memory-complex representing a cat and the audio complex representing the spoken version of…

It definitely doesn't mean you have to wait for the audio to finish playing. It does mean that your brain thinks the audio. Which has a lot of consequences, including the energy it takes to think...

Most people do read poetry silently, in the same way they read prose (I don't literally subvocalize), and the sound still is everything. Try reading these two poems silently:

http://www.mcgonagall-online.org.uk/gems/the-tay-bridge-disa... http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/174183

Re: Urbit: an operating function

#95

Post by yarvin9 »

mundo wrote: post #92
yarvin9 wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a lot of folk workarounds for this problem. They're mostly fine for languages that use ASCII lightly. But it'd be a pretty confusing mess if we applied the "pick something in the jargon file" approach to something like the Hoon syntax. Everyone who's learned our ASCII dictionary, which admittedly is not a whole lot of people, applies it compulsively.

Is the list in the whitepaper correct? It shows in part: nap [ pan ] lep ( pel } If that's not a typo, using mirrored words for ( and } is downright malicious.

Doh! That serves me right for tweaking these right before shipping the whitepaper. Yes, "pel" is ).

Re: Urbit: an operating function

#96

Post by melloclello »

david-given wrote: post #62
yarvin9 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"It's an old mistake and not very costly in practice, but the intuitive rightness isn't worth the pain in the butt." Why is it intuitively right?

"a string can be slack in many ways, but taut in only one"

0 is true, everything else is false. At least that's my intuition.

Re: Urbit: an operating function

#97

Post by dustingetz »

MichaelAza wrote: post #73
dustingetz wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> being different for the sake of being different Urbit has brilliant technical insight into perhaps the hardest problem our industry currently faces: why does everything always turn into a big ball of mud? Urbit may turn out to be incredibly important. Parent comment is unjustified, uninformed, poor tone and ad hominem.

On the contrary, I'm quite interested and impressed by the technical quality of the project. I'm pointing out that throwing all first principles out of the window, even when its clearly unnecessary (renaming the ASCII characters) makes it harder to approach for no good reason.

Sorry, it looks like I read your comment uncharitably.

Re: Urbit: an operating function

#98

Post by david-given »

yarvin9 wrote: post #94
david-given wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm afraid I'm having a great deal of trouble understanding your point here. > "Subvocalize" has a literal meaning (micro-activation of the vocal cords) which good silent readers avoid. Right; so I'm not subvocalising. > But you're still activating the vocal areas of the brain... Well, sure. I see the symbol 'cat' and both the memory-complex representing a cat and the audio complex representing the spoken version of…

It definitely doesn't mean you have to wait for the audio to finish playing. It does mean that your brain thinks the audio. Which has a lot of consequences, including the energy it takes to think... Most people do read poetry silently, in the same way they read prose (I don't literally subvocalize), and the sound still is everything. Try reading these two poems silently: http://www.mcgonagall-online.org.uk/gems/the-t…

> It does mean that your brain thinks the audio.

I'm sorry, that's simply not true. At least for me. It may be true for you.

From the things you've said, I suspect you're a word-at-a-time reader, treating words as a sequential symbol stream, processing them as if they were speech. This is just one of the several different styles of reading. Others exist.

I am, as I mentioned above, a phrase-at-a-time reader. I take in multiple symbols at a time, and not necessarily in sequence. If I had to think through the audio of a phrase, this simply wouldn't work. It also means that I would be unable to read symbols that didn't have an audio equivalent.

Right now I'm working with Smalltalk. One of its operators is ~~. How is this pronounced? Don't know, don't care. It's just ~~. When I perceive it, I don't perceive 'tilde tilde'; it's a ~~.

(Also, if you aren't reading Scotland's worst poet aloud, you are wasting him.)

Re: Urbit: an operating function

#99

Post by akhilcacharya »

jpt4 wrote: post #39
akhilcacharya wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Interesting stuff, but in my usual 15 minutes of attention-span for things like this, utterly impenetrable. It's pretty much designed to be as hard to understand as possible. Look at the source/demo videos - it seems like it's designed to be obfuscated. https://github.com/urbit/urbit http://urbit.org/preview/~2015.9.25/materials/part-i Personally, I can't get over the really made up words.

You mean that out of all the things in this combinator [0] flavored abstract rewrite system [1], programmed via a symmetrical [2], forward-inferenced [3] typed language, exposing modula-2 style per-code-block compilation control [4], all designed to support a content centric [5], natively networked [6] global computing environment with sovereignty-hard siloing capabilities [7], the most difficult part to understand i…

That's not at all the thing that I have the hardest time understanding, you're right - it's just the thing, along with CY's past, that makes me stop taking it seriously, although it is an interesting idea if it were implemented in a way that didn't attempt to be as arcane as humanly possible.

Re: Urbit: an operating function

#100

Post by akavel »

david-given wrote: post #88
anon4 wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, ++ is "increment" in C/C++. The glyphs themselves can be described "plus plus", but everybody calls it increment, because of what it does. Also "->" the arrow operator. Everyone calls it arrow, rather than "minus greater than". It makes sense to call the glyph or collection of glyphs by what they do, rather than spelling them out.

Actually, everyone I know calls it 'plus plus'. I'm with you with 'arrow', though.

Arrow's still rather on the 'plus plus' side of things anyway - maybe not 'minus greater than', but generally describes the look of it. If one would call ++ 'increment', one should call -> 'field' or something similar, I suppose.
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