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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 hi

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?]

jpt4 11y ago
I have added you to the dossier, Mr. Ehrlich - do not fear, this is a good thing.
- ClintEhrlich 11y ago
  Duly noted. Feel free to shoot a message to my Gmail. My address is my first name, followed by the first initial of my last name, then the letter Q.
loqi 11y ago
Library gap aside, Lisp has an FFI. If you want to use libpng from Lisp, you just make some C calls. If you want to use libpng from Hoon, you first have to re-implement the functionality of interest in Hoon just to have a sound basis for using the C library (as a drop-in optimization, or "jet"). This obviously makes for slower going, especially near the beginning.
yarvin9 11y ago
Hoon didn't really work properly until 2012 or so. Actually I've paid very little attention to it since 2013. Most of the time since mid 2012 (me for about a year, me and a few other for two for two more) has gone into writing Arvo, a purely functional operating system. Arvo is not enough like anything else to be seen as anything else but research. This is a fairly typical timeline for CS research. What's unusual is just the depth of the stack. I would also point out that if you look at the normal cost of developing any sort of operating system, even to the alpha level, the metrics are pretty good. Where the project looks really unproductive is in objective measures of content production. For instance, Nock took me roughly from 2002 to 2008, which is something like a bit and a half of output per day.

jpt4 11y ago

I have added you to the dossier, Mr. Ehrlich - do not fear, this is a good thing.

ClintEhrlich 11y ago
Duly noted. Feel free to shoot a message to my Gmail. My address is my first name, followed by the first initial of my last name, then the letter Q.

loqi 11y ago

Library gap aside, Lisp has an FFI. If you want to use libpng from Lisp, you just make some C calls. If you want to use libpng from Hoon, you first have to re-implement the functionality of interest in Hoon just to have a sound basis for using the C library (as a drop-in optimization, or "jet"). This obviously makes for slower going, especially near the beginning.

yarvin9 11y ago

Hoon didn't really work properly until 2012 or so. Actually I've paid very little attention to it since 2013. Most of the time since mid 2012 (me for about a year, me and a few other for two for two more) has gone into writing Arvo, a purely functional operating system. Arvo is not enough like anything else to be seen as anything else but research. This is a fairly typical timeline for CS research. What's unusual is just the depth of the stack. I would also point out that if you look at the normal cost of developing any sort of operating system, even to the alpha level, the metrics are pretty good. Where the project looks really unproductive is in objective measures of content production. For instance, Nock took me roughly from 2002 to 2008, which is something like a bit and a half of output per day.