141–150 of 177 posts
The aesthetics is what is making this thing possible. Thinking with the old words would not allow development of new things. I don't know if this is good or bad, but it is sincerely trying to do new things, so a new language is appropriate.
The aesthetics is what is making this thing possible. Thinking with the old words would not allow development of new things. I don't know if this is good or bad, but it is sincerely trying to do new things, so a new language is appropriate.
New things are developed every day with old words. There are existing words for just about everything Urbit does.
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The notion that the OS and the network are essentially the same thing, a series of procedure calls somehow knitted together either with a stack in memory or as a series of serialized frames on a network, strikes me as a very 1980s way of framing computer science. I feel like the last 20 years of network software development have been a repudiation of that idea. So yeah, I find it frustrating that Urbit insists that a…
I actually like that we're having a substantive discussion in a snarky way. But 1980s? Not to make it personal, but I finished Brown in 1992 and dropped out of Berkeley in 1994 (where I arguably invented ASLR [0], though the basic idea was Larry Peterson's) My field was OS in general and networking in specific, I took Mark Weiser's ubiquitous computing seminar from Mark Weiser, and if there are pieces of paper entitl…
Do I miss usenet? I have to say I only ever liked it from within emacs, with glowing characters on a black background. Seeing it on a web page, dark on light, is just not the same. Les neiges d'antan
Once upon a time, it was fun to see what you could learn about an IP address that you found in a weblog. Who bothers anymore?
Perhaps it is snowing, in a way that we are too sinful to perceive!
There are plenty of numbers. We could all have one, forever; or until we die, and then we can, like Charlemagne, will them to our children, who will factor them at leisure
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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…
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> 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.…
Well, C has ++, which is different from +, and it has &&, which is different from &. It also has ?:, and >> and To me, C syntax is obvious, because I've been using it for 30 years. It may be a small set of operators, but "meanings close to their standard mathematical ones" may be a bit of a stretch.
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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...
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> 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 doe…
It's a product people say that they want. Isn't freedom terrifying. The freedom business has never payed as well as the slave business.
That was a fun white paper to read, even if I had to skim over the programmatical parts.
The strangest part of this all is that they don't even know what to do with it. Okay, we have the perfect computing system, now what? Do we simply live here, all nice and connected.
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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 doe…
> You don't hear the former at all; but you hear the latter as "plus plus," don't you? I really do not. A short silence, both of them. I suppose it depends on how you normally code. I have never had a need for speaking out code and am not well versed in it.
And the weird thing is that the little silences where symbols should go are all completely distinct.