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The obscurantism is both part of what makes it intriguing, and what makes it utterly useless. It's intentionally anti-intuitive at many turns - for every clever

The obscurantism is both part of what makes it intriguing, and what makes it utterly useless. It's intentionally anti-intuitive at many turns - for every clever name, there's dozens of arbitrary ones. 'Casks' with 'Marks' for a descriptive wrapper around a value? Clever! Doors for generators with cores and batteries? A disaster! It ends up feeling like a very compact /Forth/ fused with a Lisp. There's some ideas at its core that feel very cool once you understand them, but also lead you to have to jump through a bunch of hoops when implementing normal functionality. It's worth seeing where changed assumptions led its design, and it /is/ intriguing. But make no buts about it: the obscurantism is 100% intentional and part of the design. From what I recall, it's obscure to prevent shallow novices from being able to jump in an wreck the ecosystem. You want to learn, you have to be dedicated. I get the impulse, I really do, but this is too far in the opposite extreme.

dcow 5y ago
I don't think it's exclusively to create a high barrier (although I wouldn't be surprised if that was part of it). The argument was that in order to prevent the system from experiencing some of the same failure modes as existing internet systems, you had to deliberately fight the brain's desire to draw analogies between Urbit components and existing internet systems. The belief was that this was fundamentally a linguistic problem and could at some level be attacked by inventing an entirely new vocabulary. In other words, you can't just rebuild the stack with the same components used in the old broken stack or you'd just end up with a new broken stack. Not sure how correct this hypothesis is, but it's what I recall. The Urbit team/project has since walked back from this stance somewhat (or at least progressed Urbit also in the more accessible direction), probably due to criticism.

dcow 5y ago

I don't think it's exclusively to create a high barrier (although I wouldn't be surprised if that was part of it). The argument was that in order to prevent the system from experiencing some of the same failure modes as existing internet systems, you had to deliberately fight the brain's desire to draw analogies between Urbit components and existing internet systems. The belief was that this was fundamentally a linguistic problem and could at some level be attacked by inventing an entirely new vocabulary. In other words, you can't just rebuild the stack with the same components used in the old broken stack or you'd just end up with a new broken stack. Not sure how correct this hypothesis is, but it's what I recall. The Urbit team/project has since walked back from this stance somewhat (or at least progressed Urbit also in the more accessible direction), probably due to criticism.