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Urbit: an operating function

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Re: Urbit: an operating function

#101

Post by akavel »

csense wrote: post #58
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…

> 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.…

And then there's Haskell, with it seems to be customary to define new operators extremely often; so much so than I can't cope with the speed trying to invent and memorize how to read them subvocally, unfortunately.

Re: Urbit: an operating function

#102

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: Urbit: an operating function

#103

Post by yarvin9 »

david-given wrote: post #98
yarvin9 wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 i…

I read more like a page at a time. Some might accuse me of being a page-at-a-time writer.

Compare the way you perceive "~~" to the way you perceive "++". I hear these as "sig sig" and "lus lus". (Or rather, as "slus," because that's a further Hoon abbreviation, but never mind.) You don't hear the former at all; but you hear the latter as "plus plus," don't you?

This is because "tilde tilde" is so heavy your brain doesn't want to do the work of hearing it out. But overriding that connection doesn't save energy, which is why you do hear "plus plus." Your brain has to think the very complicated little thought, "squiggle I don't want to pronounce." It would much rather have a sound.

It's torture enough to read McGonagall silently. Out loud? Who would try that? It's tantamount to suicide.

Re: Urbit: an operating function

#104

Post by jpt4 »

akhilcacharya wrote: post #99
jpt4 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Arcanity is relative to experience, so the ASCII phonemes can indeed be the most stymieing element of this experiment in futurity. However, what do you think of the phonetic numeral system? Compared to other protocols that map identity to a unique point sha256 space, "~hex" is no worse than "46", and "~fantyv-ralpen" is obviously better than whatever is its corresponding number; Urbit's vocalizable number to name mapping is possibly its most obviously correct (to me) and portable innovation.

Re: Urbit: an operating function

#105

Post by yarvin9 »

akavel wrote: post #101
csense wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.…

And then there's Haskell, with it seems to be customary to define new operators extremely often; so much so than I can't cope with the speed trying to invent and memorize how to read them subvocally, unfortunately.

This is one thing we don't do in Hoon -- there are no user-defined macros, operator overloading, etc.

If you're going to put a lot of energy into binding syntax to sound to semantics, you only want to do it once (per language, at least.)

Re: Urbit: an operating function

#106

Post by yarvin9 »

mst wrote: post #53
yarvin9 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's exactly what we want you to think. :-)

Don't worry, we'll put up some ropes...

Re: Urbit: an operating function

#107

Post by tptacek »

yarvin9 wrote: post #54
tptacek wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I mean, this is pithy and all, but it obviously doesn't rebut my point. You could apply the same logic to any disparate collection of engineering problems.

Re: Urbit: an operating function

#109

Post by pjc50 »

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…

Clearly we should be using Victor Borge's phonetic punctuation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6bpIbdZhrzA
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