It’s not that opaque or obscurantist, the words aren’t hard to understand. I only read this once, and didn’t really look up anything than what a “jet” is, but h

It’s not that opaque or obscurantist, the words aren’t hard to understand. I only read this once, and didn’t really look up anything than what a “jet” is, but here it goes: Plunder is a definition of what they want to become a foundational system of computation that will allow past, current, and future systems to run any program. This is achieved by three parts: Plan is the computational model. It defines four things, pins (basically, global singletons), laws (defined functions), apps (partially applied functions), and nats (natural numbers). There are 5 axiomatic operations defined as well. Sire is a language used to bootstrap the plunder system. I don’t get how that works yet but it seems like an implementation detail we don’t need to know unless we’re developing a new plunder virtual machine runtime. Cogs are processes running in the virtual machine runtime that interface with calls to system hardware. They’re the programs you’re running on your virtual machine, like a message (email) client. I don’t get how this works yet, but again that seems like a detail for plunder cog programmers. The rest of the strange words are generally urbit terms that aren’t a part of plunder. Arvo seems like the urbit operating system, nock is its bytecode like plan, hoon is a language that compiles to nock, and terms like noun or subject are just terms within the urbit model like pin or law. None of this stuff is alien language. I think the concept here is that the program is the data is the state is the program. If you look at the state of a plunder system it’ll effectively be a big serialized string of the plan language. The power here is supposedly that no authority can override your desires on your plunder system because it will eventually be a frozen spec, and so virtual machine runtime implementations that are correct must run any program from any time after the freeze. That means a vm I make today will run programs a thousand years from now (probably inefficiently) and a vm created in a thousand years must run programs from today. Theoretically speaking.