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I still don't understand why this thing was chosen to be the basis for all of Urbit. What advantages do you get from building on top of Nock vs. lambda calculus
by openasocket 11y ago
I still don't understand why this thing was chosen to be the basis for all of Urbit. What advantages do you get from building on top of Nock vs. lambda calculus or SKI combinators or anything else?
- zaphar 11y agoI have no idea. I'm not Curtis. However, have you ever just wanted to burn it all down and start over? I mean all of it. lambda calculus, the von neuman architecture, all of it? Urbit is a little bit like that. When he says clean slate he really does mean clean slate. Which in a way is what makes it fun. It's so far out of your normal experience that it's delightful to play with. At least if you are someone like me anyway.
- Dylan16807 11y agoStarting over is fine, but if you make choices that are deliberately awkward because the only reasonable ideas you have were done before, that's not a clean slate. That's a twisted mirror of existing designs.
- yarvin9 11y agoI don't know that anyone has tried to build a practical system on top of SKI combinators, which are certainly simpler than Nock. It's probably quite hard. You can build a practical system around the lambda calculus, which is arguably as simple as Nock. But you don't build a practical system by building layers on top of a simple lambda interpreter; you do it by extending the simple lambda interpreter, until it's no longer simple. The critical feature of Nock is that it's very simple and you don't extend it, you layer on top of it. So, for instance, it's very easy to upgrade Hoon's syntax or semantics over the network in a live system, because the interpreter is a Nock interpreter and doesn't know anything about Hoon.