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Urbit: an operating function

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Re: Urbit: an operating function

#151

Post by emmelaich »

JulianMorrison wrote: post #126
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…

Don't blame Nock, Bash does that too. Return code 0 = true.

I call it the Tolstoy model:

    "All happy families are alike; each unhappy family
    is unhappy in its own way"
You only need one value for success/true. But you need many to indicate the modes of failure.

Re: Urbit: an operating function

#152

Post by emmelaich »

melloclello wrote: post #96
david-given wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

Huh! Pretty similar to my comparison to Tolstoy's quote on happy and unhappy families.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10282933

Re: Urbit: an operating function

#153

Post by fiatjaf »

Rusky wrote: post #141
fiatjaf wrote: post #112

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.

You didn't get it. Not radically new things. There are existing words, but using them wouldn't allow the people from Urbit to think about combining concepts in the radically different way they are doing.

In fact, they would end up saying: well, all we are trying to do already exists, so let's just write a library here, another there. You can argue this would be better, but their goal is to do a completely different thing, even if it looks it could be done with a new library for something.

Re: Urbit: an operating function

#155

Post by Rusky »

fiatjaf wrote: post #153
Rusky wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

New things are developed every day with old words. There are existing words for just about everything Urbit does.

You didn't get it. Not radically new things. There are existing words, but using them wouldn't allow the people from Urbit to think about combining concepts in the radically different way they are doing. In fact, they would end up saying: well, all we are trying to do already exists, so let's just write a library here, another there. You can argue this would be better, but their goal is to do a completely different t…

No... I got what you meant. But there are plenty of new languages and even reinvent-the-world projects that reuse existing terminology just fine. There's nothing about using existing words that makes it harder to "develop new things"- in fact, it makes it easier.

Re: Urbit: an operating function

#156

Post by icebraining »

jpt4 wrote: post #76
pcmoore wrote: post #68

For a more accessible alternative approach to all this madness see this mirror project https://github.com/tibru/tibru

I do so enjoy seeing the casual vivisection of that which tends towards attracting mystical appreciation; what remains intact is all the more deservedly numinous. For an exactly diametric plunge from the same origin into the rarefied esoteric, there is: https://github.com/mnemnion/ax/blob/master/commentary%20on%2...

Rarefied esoteric what?

Re: Urbit: an operating function

#157

Post by icebraining »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #61
david-given wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Since even a silent reader will subvocalize..." Actually, no. I don't.

Neither do I. One of the very first things that guides on how to speed-read tell you is to stop yourself from internally reading aloud.

For code, I've never even needed to stop myself; it's just intuitive. The idea that one reads code as one reads prose just seems weird. Code has so much structure (and so few operators, usually) that I can just directly map the symbols to the semantics, bypassing the composing characters.

Re: Urbit: an operating function

#158

Post by eggy »

fiatjaf wrote: post #112

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? Is Urbit based on Unix/Linux and the Von Neumann architecture? If so, it is just cosmetic coating on top of the same old foundation. I really like what's going on with people trying to create something like Urbit or old Lisp Machines on new hardware (not Von Neumann based). Interim OS, PilOS (PicoLisp on bare metal). I am still not sold on immutable data is the way forward either. I am reading a 1991 book by Peter M. Kogge "The Architecture of Symbolic Computers", playing with Shen, and interested to see what becomes of vector-based computing hardware with a language like J/APL. Lisp Machines still enthrall me, and I think a new take on them can be just what's needed to recreate computing. Not just a copy of the old Lisp Machines, but an entire rethinking of them.

Re: Urbit: an operating function

#159

Post by jpt4 »

icebraining wrote: post #156
jpt4 wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do so enjoy seeing the casual vivisection of that which tends towards attracting mystical appreciation; what remains intact is all the more deservedly numinous. For an exactly diametric plunge from the same origin into the rarefied esoteric, there is: https://github.com/mnemnion/ax/blob/master/commentary%20on%2...

Rarefied esoteric what ?

"Esoteric" as in "the esoteric", its nominalized adjectival [0] guise.

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

Re: Urbit: an operating function

#160

Post by ClintEhrlich »

yarvin9 wrote: post #135
tptacek wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It must be evident at this late juncture, Chancellor Yarvin, a full half decade since your Durdenesque doppelganger deemed the denizens of earth prepared for his prolix proclamation of Martian supremacy, that the more Carlylean your Urbit apologetics, the deeper your detractors' disposition for derisory dismissal of your loving labors as the grandiloquent, malformed products of, inter alia, luddite nostalgia for the apocryphal elegance of antediluvian computing, a nocturnal-emission inducing fetish for a fascist technocratic telos, viz automation of global autocracy, or a perniciously persuasive strain of neo-Swiftian satire, which advocates Kafkaesque madness with Kaufmanesque earnestness.

That confuses the hell out of me, because I think your plan is brilliant. What gives, broseph?

My only formal CS-education was at summer camp learning Logo when I was nine. In my early 20s, I taught myself LISP from PG's book purely so I could start wasting a few weekends a year coding an urGAI. The first practical coding I've ever done was this year, when I finally bit the bullet and learned Python and Java.

Is your vision convincing to me because I'm clueless about the harsh realities of programming useful things? Or am I able to discern its splendor because I avoided exposure to the false conventional wisdom that blinds other coders to your insights?

If you put a gun to my head, I'd have to pick door number one. Actually, if you put a gun to my head I'd say Urbit was the best thing since Filmer and then apologize for that over-the-top pastiche. But you see my dilemma.

[Edit: Serious question. You came up with Watt/Hoon 5+ years ago, and you claim it's not much harder to use than Lisp. If that's true, where is all the useful Hoon-coded software?

If I gave you five years to write things in Lisp, you could produce an incredible library of offerings... No?]

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