33 ms·

Urbit: A clean-slate functional OS

262 points by tsax 13y ago

nutate 13y ago
I really like this. I hope some younger people with more time on their hands push this farther.
- tomrod 13y ago
  I'm not sure I follow what this is. Where would I use Nock and Hoon?
  - nutate 13y ago
    To build your startup? No. To have fun? Why not.
    - tomrod 13y ago
      I should rephrase my question: on what technology platforms would one use Nock and Hoon? Embedded systems? Anything (due to "portability")?
      - zaphar 13y ago
        You are still missing the point. They wrote it because it looked like fun. It's not targeting a business problem as such it's more like it's scratching the "This looks like fun" itch. Could it maybe be used for something sure. But that doesn't have to be the motivation of the authors.
      - tinco 13y ago
        In the end it compiles down to C, so supposedly any system. Though the virtual machine is bound to have side effects (I/O) so you are bound to whatever platforms they have impleme ted those for, which might as well be Windows XP. Tldr; this question warrants an answer from someone who knows.
      - urbit 13y ago
        Here's one way to think about it. You have a Facebook profile, right? That's essentially a special-purpose cloud computer - a cloud information appliance. But, wouldn't it be cool to have an actual personal computer in the sky? Where "Facebook" or whatever would just be... a program on that computer? You can get a Linux box in the sky, easy. But... that's 15 million lines of code you're wrangling. On a network which makes Helm's Deep look like Mayberry. So, if it's your home in the cloud, it's not a cute little bungalow in the cloud. It's a giant castle in the cloud guarded by experienced professional elf ninja warriors. And ya know, even experienced professional elf ninja warriors, when they're off duty, like to let their hair down and not be thinking about orcs every other minute. So if you want the bungalow in the cloud, you need basically a new programming/execution environment, and oh also a new network. So basically a new everything. So, a person could despair, or he could go build a new everything...
      - richardlblair 13y ago
        As others have pointed out, this is art. You don't look at art, and ask "Why did you do this??". You simply enjoy it. The artist did it, to do it, and nothing further. If you can not see this that way, then I am truly sorry.
        nightski 13y ago
        If it is truly art then it doesn't make much sense why he is trying so damn hard to make it practical.
        richardlblair 13y ago
        Think of it as great architecture...
        tomrod 13y ago
        I see beauty in many things. I'm not yet at the level of programming where I see beauty in syntax -- maybe one day though!
theonewolf 13y ago
I'm pretty sure this is a giant joke ? Or nothing is implemented yet (and still, kind of jokish especially in description)?
- yebyen 13y ago
  Is this comment a joke? I haven't tried compiling it, but even if large parts of the documentation say "this isn't finished yet" there are code and compilation instructions for Linux and OSX. If it's a joke then it's a joke that two contributors seem to have taken very seriously for a number of months now. EDIT: Not like, say, Flynn... jab jab
  - theonewolf 13y ago
    I meant in a similar vein to say, esoteric languages or subsests like jsfuck.com. I see this is considered more art, and I would agree with that. It appears as if it is a large art + learning experience, and I appreciated that after I watched the movie. Not a lot of _novel_ ideas per se, but an interesting mixture of things.
urbit 13y ago
A demo video: http://vimeo.com/75312418 http://vimeo.com/75312418
- agumonkey 13y ago
  This felt like an epilog to 2001 a space odyssey. Alien world.
- mietek 13y ago
  The video shows an utterly fascinating mixture of Lisp, Erlang, Plan 9, and Bitcoin. The only missing ingredient is a proper static type system!
jsd1982 13y ago
I was with you til you introduced the Hoon syntax. Why ruin a great concept with a shit language? WHAT IS WRONG WITH LANGUAGE DESIGNERS?! Just come up with a sane language with a sane syntax on a great platform. This is apparently asking a lot. It's not fucking rocket science.
- urbit 13y ago
  I agree entirely! This is so much better than the typical "middlebrow dismissive" that I upvoted it... And actually, if you don't like Hoon you can build your own language on this platform. So long as it compiles to Nock. You'll probably have to write your first compiler in Hoon, but we do have pretty decent combinator parsers. If you can swallow the syntax...
  - jsd1982 13y ago
    I like that you upvote your critics. That amuses me greatly. I had not viewed the video before I made my first comment but after watching the video I'm impressed with your implementation and solid practical concepts, but I still abhor your Hoon syntax. I haven't looked into Nock yet but I have a feeling I might knock its syntax as well, pun intended.
urbit 13y ago
A better link would be the front page: http://www.urbit.org/ http://www.urbit.org/ I guess on the Internets, you never release anything - it's released for you. Please be warned, (a) the doc is incomplete, (b) if you create an Urbit ship you'll eventually have to destroy it, as we don't have continuity yet.
- tsax 13y ago
  Lame qn but does the name Albert Jay Nock have anything to do with 'Nock'?
  - urbit 13y ago
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Jay_Nock http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Jay_Nock http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tea_at_the_Palaz_of_Hoon http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tea_at_the_Palaz_of_Hoon Four-letter names that haven't been overexposed are hard to find. But four letters fits in a 32-bit direct atom, so the attraction is pretty irresistible.
    - tsax 13y ago
      Nice! Thought so.
    - sbmassey 13y ago
      Nothing to do with Frank Key's absurdist narrative "Ascent of the Mountain at Hoon", then? http://hootingyard.org/archives/9019 http://hootingyard.org/archives/9019
    - derleth 13y ago
      > But four letters fits in a 32-bit direct atom, so the attraction is pretty irresistible. Reminds me of how ITS limited filenames to six letters per component, because they used six bits per character and six times six is thirty-six bits, or one machine word. To this day, HAKMEM ('Hacks Memo') is still called that: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HAKMEM http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HAKMEM
- Touche 13y ago
eli_gottlieb 13y ago
Hoon is a high-level language which defines itself in Nock. Its self-compiling kernel, 7000 lines of code, specifies Hoon unambiguously; there is no Hoon spec. Hoon can be classified as a pure, strict higher-order static type-inferred functional language, with co/contra/bivariance and genericity. However, Hoon does not use lambda calculus, unification, or other constructs from “PL theory.” Hoon also excels at handling and validating untyped data, a common task on teh Internets. Its syntax is entirely novel and initially quite frightening. Crank detected. Homing in for the kill.
- urbit 13y ago
  Have fun! I recommend you start with the Nock tutorial: http://www.urbit.org/2013/08/22/Chapter-2-nock.html http://www.urbit.org/2013/08/22/Chapter-2-nock.html The build instructions in this file are out of date, use the ones from the Arvo chapter. Also, probably the best short overview is the header comment in the Hoon compiler: https://github.com/urbit/urbit/blob/master/urb/zod/arvo/hoon.hoon https://github.com/urbit/urbit/blob/master/urb/zod/arvo/hoon... Also don't miss the video: https://vimeo.com/75312418 https://vimeo.com/75312418
  - nutate 13y ago
    Oh wow. After watching the video I'm legitimately interested in more than the language. You've got some cool ideas going on there. I'll be emailing for a 32-bit destroyer in a second.
ajanuary 13y ago
So rather than having a lengthy standard it has lots of small non-standardized and brittle performance optimizations? I remain skeptical over whether this tradeoff is worth it.
- urbit 13y ago
  It's fairly easy to make them non-brittle, because it's very easy to rig a testing framework to run both the hand-optimized "jet" and the pure code, and compare them. Standardizing performance is a subtler and more interesting point. It's a fairly safe bet that anything in the kernel that needs to be is jet-propelled. Above that layer, who knows? Good old normative text may handle it. But in general, the feeling should be like the difference between hardware GL and software GL. The developer doesn't see it and the user sees it only as fast versus slow.
  - jamii 13y ago
    What about when the pure code is too slow to run? Or when the pure code is wrong but the jet is right - so that the nook spec is now not sufficient to determine semantics. Let me bury that criticism though by saying that this is the most beautiful piece of work I have seen in some time. If more people were willing to be a little crazy we might not be quite as tangled in spaghetti.
    - urbit 13y ago
      Thanks, and you're right about both problems. One, it takes a good bit of work to boot Arvo beyond a merely correct nock interpreter. The Hoon type system, for instance, is enormously painful if not jet-propelled. Two, the kind of bug you're describing is in fact the nastiest class of bug. The best way to get around it is to always make sure you write the pure code first. But this isn't possible in a variety of circumstances - and it sure wasn't possible when making Hoon first compile itself. So, as inevitably in the real world, there is no substitute for not screwing up.
      - sstewartgallus 13y ago
deleted 13y ago
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agentultra 13y ago
This is really, really neat. I really like the concepts in Avro and Urbit. Particularly interesting for me is the checkpoint/replay, distributed version control, and neighbours. This is a really cool experiment!
- urbit 13y ago
  Thanks, but Avro is someone else's cool project! (Arvo is named for http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arvo_P%C3%A4rt. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arvo_P%C3%A4rt.)
  - agentultra 13y ago
    I think I've lost all precious free time I have... this is great stuff. :)
tlb 13y ago
You say addition is O(n^2), but I think you can write an O(n) addition with only increment, recursion, and equality testing. In Python syntax: def add(a, b): return add_r(a, b, 0) def add_r(a, b, c): if b == c: return a else: return add_r(a, b, c+1) +1
- jcburnham 13y ago
  Yeah... just one of the many many things we haven't gotten around to fixing. Since it doesn't really matter for a jet-propelled function. https://github.com/urbit/urbit/issues/11 https://github.com/urbit/urbit/issues/11
- urbit 13y ago
  Yeah, it's true, the one in our kernel is O(n^2) though. Why? Because we're lame. But it hardly matters, as you'll never get anywhere with either O(n) or O(n^2) addition...
- deleted 13y ago
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- betenoire 13y ago
  It's python, so it can't handle it either way, but by moving the final "+1" into the function call, it becomes tail-recursive. return add_r(a+1, b, c+1)
fyolnish 13y ago
This is art. "There is never a reason to program in Nock. Except to learn Nock." Classic
saidajigumi 13y ago
For a project ostensibly inspired by K&R C, the copy on this site is amazingly opaque and full of its own rhetoric. Recommendation: delete all the linguistic posturing and get down to the hard work of casting light on your ideas. Let that speak for itself. By way of example, the K&R C book had a beautiful clarity and ability to fluidly move between the realms of reference, spec, and tutorial. If you're going to hold K&R C up as a model, you'd do well to mimic its documentation philosophy.
- wmf 13y ago
  It seems like Urbit is art for art's sake. The fact that it executes is a side benefit. (Oops, fyolnish beat me to it.)
- urbit 13y ago
  That's an excellent criticism. Of course the problem is exacerbated by the HN link pointing to the philosophy doc. The greatest philosophy is to have no philosophy at all, but perhaps we're not quite there yet. Actually the K&R equivalent for Hoon doesn't exist yet, and when it does it will be the first thing to read. Since it doesn't, the Arvo tutorial is the first thing to read: http://www.urbit.org/2013/08/22/Chapter-1-arvo.html http://www.urbit.org/2013/08/22/Chapter-1-arvo.html But this itself is incomplete. Watch the video first: http://www.urbit.org http://www.urbit.org Then build Arvo and use the sekrit code it generates to, basically, subscribe to our newsletter. It's just a bad idea to document anything before it works completely, because you end up with doc that validates this criticism. The right way to build a language is to build it, use it, get comfortable with it, actually master it and become an expert of sorts... then document it. Sadly, not too many of us can live up to this ideal.
  - bjz_ 13y ago
    I for one love the whimsy. We need more LearnYouaThings and Shoes and runtimes that spit out lovecraftian quotes...
  - stuaxo 13y ago
    I really enjoyed reading this + a some of the pages. Very mindbending, got up to watching the video. Am thinking it looks like it could be quite fast, I guess it would make sense to implement something like ContextFree in it as a start.
sr-ix 13y ago
I dig the Borges references riddled about.
jpt4 13y ago
From pedestal to pinnacle, all things are quantum, not classical. The metaphor that better avoids scaling obsolescence for your project is perhaps Bohmian, rather than Maxwellian.
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noonespecial 13y ago
With all that jargon I was expecting a set up for a punch line at the end. Don't nock it so hoon, it's not done jet. Ha!
- urbit 13y ago
  Sigh, HN really is turning into - never mind. :-)
quanticle 13y ago
I love the project concept. A toy functional OS would be an admirable counterpart to e.g. MINIX. That said, I have one minor quibble: A programming language is called a language for a reason - it should activate the human linguistic lobes. Another programmer said this, a long time ago, and that's how we ended up with Perl. Please don't seek to emulate Larry Wall. Perl is great for quick automation, but anything complicated built with Perl quickly converges to unintelligible line noise (barring the exercise of zen-like discipline). If you're making something for beginners, please, please, give them the tools to build abstractions in a consistent and understandable manner.
- urbit 13y ago
  Well, of course, Larry Wall is a god. But that said, the main difference between Hoon line noise and Perl line noise is that most of the ASCII we use has a very regular structure, with a (relatively) limited set of exceptions. So it looks about equally alien at first, but the Hoon ideogram (digraph) set should be easier to learn. Unfortunately at present the set of people who know it is very small - so the theory really hasn't been tested. It is what it is. But at least there's no Unicode. (Not that you can't have Unicode in strings, of course.) And anyone who doesn't like line noise has to stand up for reserved words. Some of us welcome that conversation...
  - aray 13y ago
    The unicode-in-strings but not in variables/etc bothers me about Java (coming from Go, where unicode is allowed in variables). It seems inconsistent to have two separate character sets for different semantic subsections of what is a single text file. What about unicode in comments? If I put a string in a comment can it go there?
    - urbit 13y ago
      Restricting symbols to a strict subset, rather than a strict superset, of global keyboards in practice, is about cultural literacy in practice. If you put unicode in variables, perhaps because you're using a national keyboard with special unicode powers, your code will be extremely hard to work with for programmers using a different national keyboard. Thus, even if you could do it, you shouldn't. Now, the symbols on American programmers' keyboards are not all on every keyboard in the world - but pretty much every programmer in the world knows how to find them. Thus, sticking with ASCII is basically sensible use of Postel's Law in the language design context. In comments - it should be ok but I think it breaks right now. Not a high priority bug, but definitely a bug.
cldr 13y ago
> Hoon is a keyword-free language - any alphanumeric text in the program is part of the program. Where other languages have reserved words, Hoon has squiggles. But... why?
- urbit 13y ago
  You're saying, why are reserved words a bad idea? I think most defenders of the humble reserved word would consider it, at best, a hack. Maybe it's a necessary hack, maybe not. With reserved words you are overloading two very different namespaces, the space of language primitives and the space of user functions/variables. Sure, you can get away with this. But do you want to? A language is a UI, and the potential for confusing the programmer is immense. If operators and functions are really different things - as they are in Hoon, anyway - it's very confusing to mush them together.
  - Touche 13y ago
    Lisp has no reserved words.
    - urbit 13y ago
      Yes, but Hoon would need them. Lisp gets a lot of things for free because it's based on the lambda calculus, which some regard as trivial but I don't. So, for example, lambda in Hoon is not a primitive but a relatively high-level built-in macro. This means it is part of a larger family of lambda-like things, many of which are (IMHO) quite useful. On the other hand, all these things demand either reserved words, digraphs or Unicode glyphs.
      - Peaker 13y ago
        The Lambda Calculus is so tiny how can you view it as anything but trivial? Just 3 syntactic forms building up an expression tree: Expr = Lam Name Expr | Var Name | Apply Expr Expr And one reduction rule: reduce (Apply (Lam name body) arg) = subst name arg body At least assuming unique names (no shadowing nonsense), you can't get much simpler than this...
alfredjaynock 13y ago
So this is what moldbug does in his spare time.
yebyen 13y ago
I distinctly get the impression that the authors of this project will already know what Lojban is. This language (especially when you get to the part about reserved words, actually made up with special characters as runes, and how to pronounce them) made me think of the structure of Lojban right away. For anyone who hasn't heard of it, http://www.tlg.uci.edu/~opoudjis/lojbanbrochure/lessons/ http://www.tlg.uci.edu/~opoudjis/lojbanbrochure/lessons/ Urbit of course having the advantage that it can be programmed in... the video is very cool!
- urbit 13y ago
  mi prami la lojban .ui
  - nemo1618 13y ago
    ge'edai
    - yebyen 13y ago
      I googled, got 1/3 of the way through "Subsequent UI Cmavo", and gave up. If you explained in lojban, I promise I'd struggle a few minutes longer before giving up :D http://www.lojban.org/tiki/Subsequent+UI+Cmavo http://www.lojban.org/tiki/Subsequent+UI+Cmavo I read Arabic fairly well but I did not understand Lojban, not having any framework to understand it in, whereas I took Arabic classes for basically four years of college. I got "prami" to mean love, and .ui to mean ":)" Why do you put .i at the beginning of some sentences?
      - nemo1618 13y ago
        Disclaimer: I'm no lojban expert myself, so this may be inaccurate. {mi prami la lojban .ui} is pretty straightforward: I love lojban, plus the {.ui} attitudinal, which indicates happiness (or as you said, ":)"). The period {.} is an interesting part of lojban. It indicates a glottal stop. Most words in lojban start with a consonant, so glottal stops are placed before words that begin with a vowel (mainly just attitudinals and names). This is to prevent words from flowing into one another when speaking rapidly, which is important since one of the design goals of lojban is to avoid ambiguity. {.i} is actually punctuation: it marks the boundary between sentences. All punctuation is pronounced in lojban. This may sound exhausting, but again, it reduces ambiguity. {ge'edai} is intended to mean "I know that feel" -- {ge'e} meaning "unspecified emotion" and {dai} meaning "empathy" -- but I'm not sure if combining them is grammatically correct. Perhaps {dai} alone would be more accurate.
deleted 13y ago
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sz4kerto 13y ago
Astonished. Reminds me a bit of A+, however. :)
mhartl 13y ago
Congrats on the launch (even if teh Internets did it for you)!
samograd 13y ago
So if we had to read the above decrement...we’d say: “luslus dec sigfas cen dec bartis a tis pat sigbar soq dec soq ketcab pat wutgal tis pel zero a per tislus b tis pat barhep wutcol tis pel a lus pel b per per b buc pel b lus pel b per per.” Absolute brilliance.
FeepingCreature 13y ago
Well, I've read most the docs, let's say _skimmed_ the code examples, and I think you're a very smart, competent engineer with a sense of what makes for good language syntax that is utterly, incomprehensibly alien to me. So I guess, martian-language mission accomplished?
dreen 13y ago
Love the fact you used music by the god of ambient, Bran Eno.
quarterto 13y ago
Hoon also excels at handling and validating untyped data, a common task on teh Internets. Not sure if satire?
zzzmarcus 13y ago
Just some background, this is by Mencius Moldbug, a.k.a. Curtis Yarvin, a.k.a. C. Guy Yarvin of Unqualified Reservations fame. It's been in the works for a long time and is certainly a serious project. http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2010/01/urbit-functional-programming-from.html http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2010/01/urbit-f... http://moronlab.blogspot.com/ http://moronlab.blogspot.com/
- clarkm 13y ago
  Someone earlier in this thread mentioned his apparent disdain for PL research. If you want some background on his experiences, as well as some great musings on the current state of CS grad programs, I recommend these two articles: http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2007/07/my-navrozov-moments.html http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2007/07/my-navr... http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2007/08/whats-wrong-with-cs-research.html http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2007/08/whats-w...
  - mietek 13y ago
    I will not comment on the judgement passed upon the education system. The second article exhibits eristic tricks, obfuscatory language, and a plain confusion of ideas, especially when speaking about proof-carrying code and type theory. It's interesting to see the author wishing for a Python of functional programming, and yet Hoon's syntax appears deliberately obscure. However, there is one paragraph with which I wholeheartedly agree: > I think the world could use a charity that funds creative programming. The software systems that people use today — don't even start me on "Web 2.0" — are awful and ancient, and hardly anyone has any reasonable plan to improve them. Free-software programmers are not at all bad at supporting themselves, but nothing like Xerox PARC exists today, and it should. It should, and, hopefully, it will. Soon.
    - drewhk 13y ago
      Deliberately obscure, yes: >We should note that in Nock and Hoon, 0 (pronounced “yes”) is true, and 1 (“no”) is false. Why? It’s fresh, it’s different, it’s new. And it’s annoying. And it keeps you on your toes. And it’s also just intuitively right.
dmytrish 13y ago
Codex Seraphinianus of programming? I think it's a true piece of postmodern art.
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colanderman 13y ago
"""Its self-compiling kernel, 7000 lines of code, specifies Hoon unambiguously; there is no Hoon spec.""" You realize there's such a thing as over-specifying something, right? You realize that using source code as a spec does this? If you don't realize; consider that non-data aspects of a program, such as runtime and memory usage and bug compatibility, can sometimes form part of a specification, and sometimes don't. A specification says as much what is not required of an implementation as what is required. By claiming your one true implementation is the spec, one has no means of ascertaining what behavior is incidental, and what is actually required/able to be relied upon. I'm not normally an XKCD fan, but this strip sums it up perfectly: http://xkcd.com/1172/ http://xkcd.com/1172/ . """Hoon can be classified as a pure, strict higher-order static type-inferred functional language, with co/contra/bivariance and genericity. However, Hoon does not use lambda calculus,""" A higher-order functional language does not "use" the mathematical definition of higher-order functions? In that case, what do you mean by "higher-order functional language"? EDIT: I was going to make an analogy to the hypothetical claim that language X's arithmetic system doesn't use Church numerals (i.e. the mathematical formulation of natural numbers)… but Hoon is actually implemented using Church arithmetic. Go figure. . """unification,""" By what mechanism does Hoon implement type inference? Honestly, that's kind of like saying Hoon doesn't use, say, queues. Great, but, why? . """or other constructs from “PL theory.”""" Disdainful much? I'm really curious what's the background behind the scare quotes here. . EDIT: Just to be clear, I'm not claiming your project is uninteresting or not worth your while. I just feel you're being overly dismissive of the, let's say "traditional" schools of thought, with invalid justification.
- urbit 13y ago
  As for the logical definition of a "spec," you are welcome to find any inconsistencies or imprecisions in the Nock axioms. Actually someone reported a (cosmetic) bug in the Nock spec this morning, which is quite cool. There's a very important point in that Nock can specify not what a computer computes - but what it has computed, if it terminates. In general, practical systems have to interrupt long-running computations, so they must always compute some subset of that definition. But it can be, and is, a strict subset. I find this a meaningful and accurate statement. Sorry, I didn't mean "PL theory" as scare quotes - I just didn't want to exclude anyone for whom the term doesn't instantly bring to mind a body of work. The truth, though, is that the "PL theory" we have is just one theory of programming. It's a convention, it's not a piece of reality like pi. Church-Turing equivalence tells us that we have infinitely many such representations. Eg, the Turing Machine is equivalent in power to lambda, but much less useful as a programming framework. My feeling is that, as a programming model, lambda suffers from the fact that it was originally designed, by mathematicians, to do mathematics. Just from a UI basis, programmers are not mathematicians. The skill is very similar, but mathematicians work best in geometric and logical abstractions, whereas programmers are more comfortable with mechanical representations. For instance, the general lambda approach is to represent data as code (Church numerals), a very sensible approach from the math side, whereas the Nock approach is to represent code as data - which feels more natural to the programmer. So, nothing can tarnish the very powerful and elegant model of computing that is "PL theory." But it is not "the" theory of computing - just one of infinitely many possible theories.
batemanesque 13y ago
using "teh Internets" on yr front page is a great way to put off anyone who doesn't subscribe to calcified "geek culture"
wgd 13y ago
The more I think about it the more I really like the whole "Jets" concept (although I'm not sold on the name, I'd love to learn that it's a known concept in the PL field with a nicer name). I'd like to see how such an approach would work out for optimizing something more "fundamental" like the Binary Lambda Calculus.
- jamii 13y ago
  Haskell has rewrite rules which is how eg stream fusion is implemented. http://www.haskell.org/ghc/docs/7.0.1/html/users_guide/rewrite-rules.html http://www.haskell.org/ghc/docs/7.0.1/html/users_guide/rewri...
state 13y ago
If ever there was a right attitude about bringing a radical project in to the world: this is it. I just spent 15 minutes just _reading_ the documentation. Because it's _interesting_. That never happens.
0xdeadbeefbabe 13y ago
Reminds me of the punchline, "consider a spherical cow" > To a Pascal purist, to anyone who thinks mathematically, this seemed hideous. C isn’t really a high-level language at all - it’s a glorified macro assembler. Mankind retreats to the cave. Leaky abstractions are hideous too, don't you think?
melloclello 13y ago
Hey Moldy I just want to say 'ur-bit' is a pretty cool name B-)
eonil 13y ago
Though I couldn't understand them fully... The names are awesome! The concepts are awesome! And the music is awesome!!!
- eonil 13y ago
  I see some similarity to Smalltalk or Windows PowerShell. And this made me to imagine typed Smalltalk/Objective-C style syntax on shell which would be great for usability...
  - offensivehandle 13y ago
    Shell programs are expected to take streams of data and produce other streams of data. Shell programs are also supposed to, but often don't, have uniform configuration options. Instead, we have ps ax | grep chromium | grep -v grep | awk '{print $1}' | xargs kill * ps accepts ax with no - * awk is its own programming language lol * xargs gets pretty complicated if anything bigger than this happens (incidently, I know about awk '/chromium/ {print $1}' and killall. but i have seen that command line in the wild. because some people don't read the awk manual for fun, and i'm not sure if every unix system even has a killall command) ...and yet the shell is still the preferred tool for what it does because everything else requires too much typing (of both varieties) Apparently urbit also has streams of raw data. It's about time someone came up with a new idea for a shell that keeps what's great about the shell (though personally, i would standardize on streaming a form of json, because it turns out that data is very often found as scalars, lists, and mappings). So anyway. If urbit actually ends up being better to live in than unix, and having shell programs that are configured in exactly one way would be an improvement, and having data that's easier to parse than plain text while remaining as easy to read as plain text would also be an improvement, well, I've always wanted to live in a submarine. If it gets a nice editor and c++ compiler, that is. I do need the best performance possible out of my computer for my work.
arh68 13y ago
Would you mind doing lots more screencasts? Maybe writing a jet, rigging a test, profiling, and maybe a bunch of other things. I very much like your demo style, and I have a hunch these docs are going to be pretty dense. ;)
jyf1987 13y ago
so its root in forth?
cdcarter 13y ago
I can't tell what I'm more confused/impressed by, Hoon or the social model. Either way, I've got a destroyer and now I'm trying to understand just how zod works.
losethos 13y ago
Ba ha! Check this out, God, these clowns are fucking with us. God says... informed elephant created Life Prodigality chiefest Volunteers hesitating harmonious thieve owed write fainting withered mirthful thirsted elders external disputes embrace polished salted life- it'd_take_a_miracle restrained sighed sites beholdeth Led Trust required discordant OTHER shines liker husband recollecting pastime restraint unhappy precede wretchedness Tonga sides lords proveth extricate org/gutenberg/etext02 deservings I_didn't_see_that flat Yo readers' caution lodging respite refresh New_Zealand Can weary Thence glue Predicament honouring done groanings fellows worm innocency ETEXT remainder leaven straighten_up hair boink Release illumined sigheth clear You_fix_it infidelity quicken partake Zambia advising Minerva indemnify convertedst do thrustedst Ridiculous suspect conquests computer corrected counted defining ample raven casts boyhood burthened intend births origin 'may voodoo
perlgeek 13y ago
A VM that can be precisely described in 200 words? Does that include the IO subsystem? I have my doubts that it's possible to describe a full set of IO operations that any modern VM needs in so few words, just because of the wealth of features that you usually need (file system access, sockets (TCP and UDP), pipes, IPC, ...)
dancecodes 13y ago
video not work in ff linux
- offensivehandle 13y ago
  i just finished watching it in firefox on a freshly-installed linux mint 15
  - dancecodes 13y ago
    nothing appropriate, gentoo and Im too lazy for fixing it (=^‥^=)
dancecodes 13y ago
without flash of course there
JulianMorrison 13y ago
I love this concept of jets and how it allows a "completely isolated" VM to magically grow connections to the real world.
gwern 13y ago
>I ate something I shouldn't have the other day and ended up having this surreal dream where Mencius Moldbug had gotten tired of the state of the software industry and the Internet and had made his personal solution to it all into an actual piece of working software that was some sort of bizarre synthesis of a peer-to-peer identity and distributed computing platform, an operating system and a programming language. Unfortunately, you needed to figure out an insane system of phoneticized punctuation that got rewritten into a combinator grammar VM code if you wanted to program anything in it. I think there even was a public Github with reams of code in it, but when I tried to read it I realized that my computer was actually a cardboard box with an endless swarm of spiders crawling out of it while all my teeth were falling out, and then I woke up without ever finding out exactly how the thing was supposed to work. http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/ipu/open_thread_september_2329_2013/9szc http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/ipu/open_thread_septemb...
offensivehandle 13y ago
Okay, since you want comments here, here I'll put mine. The reason you were so successful in coming up with a new political philosophy is that your "I'm a Martian" trick got you think thoughts that no respectable person would be caught dead thinking. There aren't the same taboos in computer system design, so while you can refer to the systems people use every day as gigabytes of, what was it, of ass fucking more ass, there's nothing you say that I haven't already heard. I'm still waiting for the Python of functional programming. Paul Graham announced Arc when I was in middle school. Maybe it will be released as the scripting system in Half-Life 3. Being an alien from Alpha Centauri, and observing the growing collection of programming languages, what do you think people keep designing new ones for? Why do some Urplatians argue for Scheme and other Urplatians for Python? Rather than asking the question of 'what is a programming language', and trying to design the axiomatically simplest possible thing, try asking the question of 'how do people use programming languages'. Is your system a bit of syntax regularization away from the pseudocode people scribble on paper to explain algorithms to each other? No, that's Python. Is your system something that compiles down to use the bare metal to its fullest potential while maintaining as much creature comforts as possible? No, that's C++. Is your system something with an ancient history of having a solid ABI, that in fact every other language's ABI is described with? No, that's C. Is your system a heap of cruft upon kludges with the original intention of providing programming access to a hypertext document? That's Javascript. I wouldn't want to write a regex as anything but a regex. In conclusion, you're asking a question that's been asked before and getting an answer that's been gotten before. But, maybe it is finally time for functional programming to come back. Maybe you're a popular enough guy to get people to use your system.
- davidgerard 13y ago
  "Being an alien from Alpha Centauri, and observing the growing collection of programming languages, what do you think people keep designing new ones for? Why do some Urplatians argue for Scheme and other Urplatians for Python?" Typical mind fallacy. http://lesswrong.com/lw/dr/generalizing_from_one_example/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/dr/generalizing_from_one_example/ Most people model other people as just like themselves, plus or minus a diff. The trouble is that they don't understand just how wide-ranging human thoughts and feelings can be, and assume they will understand and be able to model based on the diff, even if the diff is larger than their whole mind. It's why geeks keep coming up with "intuitively obvious" schemes no-one else can understand, and why engineers are routinely surprised at what actual end users do with their products in user testing. So people write new languages that suit their personal peculiar ways of thinking. Thankfully, many are quite aware that this is what they are doing and don't claim universality. This is why Urbit is art: translating numbers and ASCII characters into nonsense syllables that you are actually expected to pronounce and think in suits Yarvin's mind, even as it leaves me thinking "there is such a thing as being too much of a Borges fan". Which is absolutely fine. But this is why Urbit is art (an expression of a unique personal vision), not anything people are actually going to use without similar levels of confusion to the present. For an example of fully rampant Typical Mind Fallacy in Urbit, see the security document: http://www.urbit.org/2013/08/22/Chapter-6-security.html http://www.urbit.org/2013/08/22/Chapter-6-security.html About two-thirds of the way down, you can actually see Yarvin transform into Moldbug and start pontificating on how humans communicating on a network should work, and never mind the observable evidence of how they actually have behaved whenever each of the conditions he describes have obtained. The very first thing people will do with the Urbit system is try to mess with its assumptions, in ways that its creators literally could not foresee (due to Typical Mind Fallacy), though they might have been reasonably expected to (given the real world as data).

262 points by tsax 13y ago

nutate 13y ago

I really like this. I hope some younger people with more time on their hands push this farther.

tomrod 13y ago
I'm not sure I follow what this is. Where would I use Nock and Hoon?
- nutate 13y ago
  To build your startup? No. To have fun? Why not.
  - tomrod 13y ago
    I should rephrase my question: on what technology platforms would one use Nock and Hoon? Embedded systems? Anything (due to "portability")?
    - zaphar 13y ago
      You are still missing the point. They wrote it because it looked like fun. It's not targeting a business problem as such it's more like it's scratching the "This looks like fun" itch. Could it maybe be used for something sure. But that doesn't have to be the motivation of the authors.
    - tinco 13y ago
      In the end it compiles down to C, so supposedly any system. Though the virtual machine is bound to have side effects (I/O) so you are bound to whatever platforms they have impleme ted those for, which might as well be Windows XP. Tldr; this question warrants an answer from someone who knows.
    - urbit 13y ago
      Here's one way to think about it. You have a Facebook profile, right? That's essentially a special-purpose cloud computer - a cloud information appliance. But, wouldn't it be cool to have an actual personal computer in the sky? Where "Facebook" or whatever would just be... a program on that computer? You can get a Linux box in the sky, easy. But... that's 15 million lines of code you're wrangling. On a network which makes Helm's Deep look like Mayberry. So, if it's your home in the cloud, it's not a cute little bungalow in the cloud. It's a giant castle in the cloud guarded by experienced professional elf ninja warriors. And ya know, even experienced professional elf ninja warriors, when they're off duty, like to let their hair down and not be thinking about orcs every other minute. So if you want the bungalow in the cloud, you need basically a new programming/execution environment, and oh also a new network. So basically a new everything. So, a person could despair, or he could go build a new everything...
    - richardlblair 13y ago
      As others have pointed out, this is art. You don't look at art, and ask "Why did you do this??". You simply enjoy it. The artist did it, to do it, and nothing further. If you can not see this that way, then I am truly sorry.
      - nightski 13y ago
        If it is truly art then it doesn't make much sense why he is trying so damn hard to make it practical.
        richardlblair 13y ago
        Think of it as great architecture...
      - tomrod 13y ago
        I see beauty in many things. I'm not yet at the level of programming where I see beauty in syntax -- maybe one day though!

theonewolf 13y ago

I'm pretty sure this is a giant joke ? Or nothing is implemented yet (and still, kind of jokish especially in description)?

yebyen 13y ago
Is this comment a joke? I haven't tried compiling it, but even if large parts of the documentation say "this isn't finished yet" there are code and compilation instructions for Linux and OSX. If it's a joke then it's a joke that two contributors seem to have taken very seriously for a number of months now. EDIT: Not like, say, Flynn... jab jab
- theonewolf 13y ago
  I meant in a similar vein to say, esoteric languages or subsests like jsfuck.com. I see this is considered more art, and I would agree with that. It appears as if it is a large art + learning experience, and I appreciated that after I watched the movie. Not a lot of _novel_ ideas per se, but an interesting mixture of things.

urbit 13y ago

A demo video: http://vimeo.com/75312418 http://vimeo.com/75312418

agumonkey 13y ago
This felt like an epilog to 2001 a space odyssey. Alien world.
mietek 13y ago
The video shows an utterly fascinating mixture of Lisp, Erlang, Plan 9, and Bitcoin. The only missing ingredient is a proper static type system!

jsd1982 13y ago

I was with you til you introduced the Hoon syntax. Why ruin a great concept with a shit language? WHAT IS WRONG WITH LANGUAGE DESIGNERS?! Just come up with a sane language with a sane syntax on a great platform. This is apparently asking a lot. It's not fucking rocket science.

urbit 13y ago
I agree entirely! This is so much better than the typical "middlebrow dismissive" that I upvoted it... And actually, if you don't like Hoon you can build your own language on this platform. So long as it compiles to Nock. You'll probably have to write your first compiler in Hoon, but we do have pretty decent combinator parsers. If you can swallow the syntax...
- jsd1982 13y ago
  I like that you upvote your critics. That amuses me greatly. I had not viewed the video before I made my first comment but after watching the video I'm impressed with your implementation and solid practical concepts, but I still abhor your Hoon syntax. I haven't looked into Nock yet but I have a feeling I might knock its syntax as well, pun intended.

urbit 13y ago

A better link would be the front page: http://www.urbit.org/ http://www.urbit.org/ I guess on the Internets, you never release anything - it's released for you. Please be warned, (a) the doc is incomplete, (b) if you create an Urbit ship you'll eventually have to destroy it, as we don't have continuity yet.

tsax 13y ago
Lame qn but does the name Albert Jay Nock have anything to do with 'Nock'?
- urbit 13y ago
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Jay_Nock http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Jay_Nock http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tea_at_the_Palaz_of_Hoon http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tea_at_the_Palaz_of_Hoon Four-letter names that haven't been overexposed are hard to find. But four letters fits in a 32-bit direct atom, so the attraction is pretty irresistible.
  - tsax 13y ago
    Nice! Thought so.
  - sbmassey 13y ago
    Nothing to do with Frank Key's absurdist narrative "Ascent of the Mountain at Hoon", then? http://hootingyard.org/archives/9019 http://hootingyard.org/archives/9019
  - derleth 13y ago
    > But four letters fits in a 32-bit direct atom, so the attraction is pretty irresistible. Reminds me of how ITS limited filenames to six letters per component, because they used six bits per character and six times six is thirty-six bits, or one machine word. To this day, HAKMEM ('Hacks Memo') is still called that: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HAKMEM http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HAKMEM
Touche 13y ago

eli_gottlieb 13y ago

Hoon is a high-level language which defines itself in Nock. Its self-compiling kernel, 7000 lines of code, specifies Hoon unambiguously; there is no Hoon spec. Hoon can be classified as a pure, strict higher-order static type-inferred functional language, with co/contra/bivariance and genericity. However, Hoon does not use lambda calculus, unification, or other constructs from “PL theory.” Hoon also excels at handling and validating untyped data, a common task on teh Internets. Its syntax is entirely novel and initially quite frightening. Crank detected. Homing in for the kill.

urbit 13y ago
Have fun! I recommend you start with the Nock tutorial: http://www.urbit.org/2013/08/22/Chapter-2-nock.html http://www.urbit.org/2013/08/22/Chapter-2-nock.html The build instructions in this file are out of date, use the ones from the Arvo chapter. Also, probably the best short overview is the header comment in the Hoon compiler: https://github.com/urbit/urbit/blob/master/urb/zod/arvo/hoon.hoon https://github.com/urbit/urbit/blob/master/urb/zod/arvo/hoon... Also don't miss the video: https://vimeo.com/75312418 https://vimeo.com/75312418
- nutate 13y ago
  Oh wow. After watching the video I'm legitimately interested in more than the language. You've got some cool ideas going on there. I'll be emailing for a 32-bit destroyer in a second.

ajanuary 13y ago

So rather than having a lengthy standard it has lots of small non-standardized and brittle performance optimizations? I remain skeptical over whether this tradeoff is worth it.

urbit 13y ago
It's fairly easy to make them non-brittle, because it's very easy to rig a testing framework to run both the hand-optimized "jet" and the pure code, and compare them. Standardizing performance is a subtler and more interesting point. It's a fairly safe bet that anything in the kernel that needs to be is jet-propelled. Above that layer, who knows? Good old normative text may handle it. But in general, the feeling should be like the difference between hardware GL and software GL. The developer doesn't see it and the user sees it only as fast versus slow.
- jamii 13y ago
  What about when the pure code is too slow to run? Or when the pure code is wrong but the jet is right - so that the nook spec is now not sufficient to determine semantics. Let me bury that criticism though by saying that this is the most beautiful piece of work I have seen in some time. If more people were willing to be a little crazy we might not be quite as tangled in spaghetti.
  - urbit 13y ago
    Thanks, and you're right about both problems. One, it takes a good bit of work to boot Arvo beyond a merely correct nock interpreter. The Hoon type system, for instance, is enormously painful if not jet-propelled. Two, the kind of bug you're describing is in fact the nastiest class of bug. The best way to get around it is to always make sure you write the pure code first. But this isn't possible in a variety of circumstances - and it sure wasn't possible when making Hoon first compile itself. So, as inevitably in the real world, there is no substitute for not screwing up.
    - sstewartgallus 13y ago

deleted 13y ago

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agentultra 13y ago

This is really, really neat. I really like the concepts in Avro and Urbit. Particularly interesting for me is the checkpoint/replay, distributed version control, and neighbours. This is a really cool experiment!

urbit 13y ago
Thanks, but Avro is someone else's cool project! (Arvo is named for http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arvo_P%C3%A4rt. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arvo_P%C3%A4rt.)
- agentultra 13y ago
  I think I've lost all precious free time I have... this is great stuff. :)

tlb 13y ago

You say addition is O(n^2), but I think you can write an O(n) addition with only increment, recursion, and equality testing. In Python syntax: def add(a, b): return add_r(a, b, 0) def add_r(a, b, c): if b == c: return a else: return add_r(a, b, c+1) +1

jcburnham 13y ago
Yeah... just one of the many many things we haven't gotten around to fixing. Since it doesn't really matter for a jet-propelled function. https://github.com/urbit/urbit/issues/11 https://github.com/urbit/urbit/issues/11
urbit 13y ago
Yeah, it's true, the one in our kernel is O(n^2) though. Why? Because we're lame. But it hardly matters, as you'll never get anywhere with either O(n) or O(n^2) addition...
deleted 13y ago
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betenoire 13y ago
It's python, so it can't handle it either way, but by moving the final "+1" into the function call, it becomes tail-recursive. return add_r(a+1, b, c+1)

fyolnish 13y ago

This is art. "There is never a reason to program in Nock. Except to learn Nock." Classic

saidajigumi 13y ago

For a project ostensibly inspired by K&R C, the copy on this site is amazingly opaque and full of its own rhetoric. Recommendation: delete all the linguistic posturing and get down to the hard work of casting light on your ideas. Let that speak for itself. By way of example, the K&R C book had a beautiful clarity and ability to fluidly move between the realms of reference, spec, and tutorial. If you're going to hold K&R C up as a model, you'd do well to mimic its documentation philosophy.

wmf 13y ago
It seems like Urbit is art for art's sake. The fact that it executes is a side benefit. (Oops, fyolnish beat me to it.)
urbit 13y ago
That's an excellent criticism. Of course the problem is exacerbated by the HN link pointing to the philosophy doc. The greatest philosophy is to have no philosophy at all, but perhaps we're not quite there yet. Actually the K&R equivalent for Hoon doesn't exist yet, and when it does it will be the first thing to read. Since it doesn't, the Arvo tutorial is the first thing to read: http://www.urbit.org/2013/08/22/Chapter-1-arvo.html http://www.urbit.org/2013/08/22/Chapter-1-arvo.html But this itself is incomplete. Watch the video first: http://www.urbit.org http://www.urbit.org Then build Arvo and use the sekrit code it generates to, basically, subscribe to our newsletter. It's just a bad idea to document anything before it works completely, because you end up with doc that validates this criticism. The right way to build a language is to build it, use it, get comfortable with it, actually master it and become an expert of sorts... then document it. Sadly, not too many of us can live up to this ideal.
- bjz_ 13y ago
  I for one love the whimsy. We need more LearnYouaThings and Shoes and runtimes that spit out lovecraftian quotes...
- stuaxo 13y ago
  I really enjoyed reading this + a some of the pages. Very mindbending, got up to watching the video. Am thinking it looks like it could be quite fast, I guess it would make sense to implement something like ContextFree in it as a start.

sr-ix 13y ago

I dig the Borges references riddled about.

jpt4 13y ago

From pedestal to pinnacle, all things are quantum, not classical. The metaphor that better avoids scaling obsolescence for your project is perhaps Bohmian, rather than Maxwellian.

deleted 13y ago

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noonespecial 13y ago

With all that jargon I was expecting a set up for a punch line at the end. Don't nock it so hoon, it's not done jet. Ha!

urbit 13y ago
Sigh, HN really is turning into - never mind. :-)

quanticle 13y ago

I love the project concept. A toy functional OS would be an admirable counterpart to e.g. MINIX. That said, I have one minor quibble: A programming language is called a language for a reason - it should activate the human linguistic lobes. Another programmer said this, a long time ago, and that's how we ended up with Perl. Please don't seek to emulate Larry Wall. Perl is great for quick automation, but anything complicated built with Perl quickly converges to unintelligible line noise (barring the exercise of zen-like discipline). If you're making something for beginners, please, please, give them the tools to build abstractions in a consistent and understandable manner.

urbit 13y ago
Well, of course, Larry Wall is a god. But that said, the main difference between Hoon line noise and Perl line noise is that most of the ASCII we use has a very regular structure, with a (relatively) limited set of exceptions. So it looks about equally alien at first, but the Hoon ideogram (digraph) set should be easier to learn. Unfortunately at present the set of people who know it is very small - so the theory really hasn't been tested. It is what it is. But at least there's no Unicode. (Not that you can't have Unicode in strings, of course.) And anyone who doesn't like line noise has to stand up for reserved words. Some of us welcome that conversation...
- aray 13y ago
  The unicode-in-strings but not in variables/etc bothers me about Java (coming from Go, where unicode is allowed in variables). It seems inconsistent to have two separate character sets for different semantic subsections of what is a single text file. What about unicode in comments? If I put a string in a comment can it go there?
  - urbit 13y ago
    Restricting symbols to a strict subset, rather than a strict superset, of global keyboards in practice, is about cultural literacy in practice. If you put unicode in variables, perhaps because you're using a national keyboard with special unicode powers, your code will be extremely hard to work with for programmers using a different national keyboard. Thus, even if you could do it, you shouldn't. Now, the symbols on American programmers' keyboards are not all on every keyboard in the world - but pretty much every programmer in the world knows how to find them. Thus, sticking with ASCII is basically sensible use of Postel's Law in the language design context. In comments - it should be ok but I think it breaks right now. Not a high priority bug, but definitely a bug.

cldr 13y ago

> Hoon is a keyword-free language - any alphanumeric text in the program is part of the program. Where other languages have reserved words, Hoon has squiggles. But... why?

urbit 13y ago
You're saying, why are reserved words a bad idea? I think most defenders of the humble reserved word would consider it, at best, a hack. Maybe it's a necessary hack, maybe not. With reserved words you are overloading two very different namespaces, the space of language primitives and the space of user functions/variables. Sure, you can get away with this. But do you want to? A language is a UI, and the potential for confusing the programmer is immense. If operators and functions are really different things - as they are in Hoon, anyway - it's very confusing to mush them together.
- Touche 13y ago
  Lisp has no reserved words.
  - urbit 13y ago
    Yes, but Hoon would need them. Lisp gets a lot of things for free because it's based on the lambda calculus, which some regard as trivial but I don't. So, for example, lambda in Hoon is not a primitive but a relatively high-level built-in macro. This means it is part of a larger family of lambda-like things, many of which are (IMHO) quite useful. On the other hand, all these things demand either reserved words, digraphs or Unicode glyphs.
    - Peaker 13y ago
      The Lambda Calculus is so tiny how can you view it as anything but trivial? Just 3 syntactic forms building up an expression tree: Expr = Lam Name Expr | Var Name | Apply Expr Expr And one reduction rule: reduce (Apply (Lam name body) arg) = subst name arg body At least assuming unique names (no shadowing nonsense), you can't get much simpler than this...

alfredjaynock 13y ago

So this is what moldbug does in his spare time.

yebyen 13y ago

I distinctly get the impression that the authors of this project will already know what Lojban is. This language (especially when you get to the part about reserved words, actually made up with special characters as runes, and how to pronounce them) made me think of the structure of Lojban right away. For anyone who hasn't heard of it, http://www.tlg.uci.edu/~opoudjis/lojbanbrochure/lessons/ http://www.tlg.uci.edu/~opoudjis/lojbanbrochure/lessons/ Urbit of course having the advantage that it can be programmed in... the video is very cool!

urbit 13y ago
mi prami la lojban .ui
- nemo1618 13y ago
  ge'edai
  - yebyen 13y ago
    I googled, got 1/3 of the way through "Subsequent UI Cmavo", and gave up. If you explained in lojban, I promise I'd struggle a few minutes longer before giving up :D http://www.lojban.org/tiki/Subsequent+UI+Cmavo http://www.lojban.org/tiki/Subsequent+UI+Cmavo I read Arabic fairly well but I did not understand Lojban, not having any framework to understand it in, whereas I took Arabic classes for basically four years of college. I got "prami" to mean love, and .ui to mean ":)" Why do you put .i at the beginning of some sentences?
    - nemo1618 13y ago
      Disclaimer: I'm no lojban expert myself, so this may be inaccurate. {mi prami la lojban .ui} is pretty straightforward: I love lojban, plus the {.ui} attitudinal, which indicates happiness (or as you said, ":)"). The period {.} is an interesting part of lojban. It indicates a glottal stop. Most words in lojban start with a consonant, so glottal stops are placed before words that begin with a vowel (mainly just attitudinals and names). This is to prevent words from flowing into one another when speaking rapidly, which is important since one of the design goals of lojban is to avoid ambiguity. {.i} is actually punctuation: it marks the boundary between sentences. All punctuation is pronounced in lojban. This may sound exhausting, but again, it reduces ambiguity. {ge'edai} is intended to mean "I know that feel" -- {ge'e} meaning "unspecified emotion" and {dai} meaning "empathy" -- but I'm not sure if combining them is grammatically correct. Perhaps {dai} alone would be more accurate.

deleted 13y ago

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sz4kerto 13y ago

Astonished. Reminds me a bit of A+, however. :)

mhartl 13y ago

Congrats on the launch (even if teh Internets did it for you)!

samograd 13y ago

So if we had to read the above decrement...we’d say: “luslus dec sigfas cen dec bartis a tis pat sigbar soq dec soq ketcab pat wutgal tis pel zero a per tislus b tis pat barhep wutcol tis pel a lus pel b per per b buc pel b lus pel b per per.” Absolute brilliance.

FeepingCreature 13y ago

Well, I've read most the docs, let's say _skimmed_ the code examples, and I think you're a very smart, competent engineer with a sense of what makes for good language syntax that is utterly, incomprehensibly alien to me. So I guess, martian-language mission accomplished?

dreen 13y ago

Love the fact you used music by the god of ambient, Bran Eno.

quarterto 13y ago

Hoon also excels at handling and validating untyped data, a common task on teh Internets. Not sure if satire?

zzzmarcus 13y ago

Just some background, this is by Mencius Moldbug, a.k.a. Curtis Yarvin, a.k.a. C. Guy Yarvin of Unqualified Reservations fame. It's been in the works for a long time and is certainly a serious project. http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2010/01/urbit-functional-programming-from.html http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2010/01/urbit-f... http://moronlab.blogspot.com/ http://moronlab.blogspot.com/

clarkm 13y ago
Someone earlier in this thread mentioned his apparent disdain for PL research. If you want some background on his experiences, as well as some great musings on the current state of CS grad programs, I recommend these two articles: http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2007/07/my-navrozov-moments.html http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2007/07/my-navr... http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2007/08/whats-wrong-with-cs-research.html http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2007/08/whats-w...
- mietek 13y ago
  I will not comment on the judgement passed upon the education system. The second article exhibits eristic tricks, obfuscatory language, and a plain confusion of ideas, especially when speaking about proof-carrying code and type theory. It's interesting to see the author wishing for a Python of functional programming, and yet Hoon's syntax appears deliberately obscure. However, there is one paragraph with which I wholeheartedly agree: > I think the world could use a charity that funds creative programming. The software systems that people use today — don't even start me on "Web 2.0" — are awful and ancient, and hardly anyone has any reasonable plan to improve them. Free-software programmers are not at all bad at supporting themselves, but nothing like Xerox PARC exists today, and it should. It should, and, hopefully, it will. Soon.
  - drewhk 13y ago
    Deliberately obscure, yes: >We should note that in Nock and Hoon, 0 (pronounced “yes”) is true, and 1 (“no”) is false. Why? It’s fresh, it’s different, it’s new. And it’s annoying. And it keeps you on your toes. And it’s also just intuitively right.

dmytrish 13y ago

Codex Seraphinianus of programming? I think it's a true piece of postmodern art.

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[deleted]

colanderman 13y ago

"""Its self-compiling kernel, 7000 lines of code, specifies Hoon unambiguously; there is no Hoon spec.""" You realize there's such a thing as over-specifying something, right? You realize that using source code as a spec does this? If you don't realize; consider that non-data aspects of a program, such as runtime and memory usage and bug compatibility, can sometimes form part of a specification, and sometimes don't. A specification says as much what is not required of an implementation as what is required. By claiming your one true implementation is the spec, one has no means of ascertaining what behavior is incidental, and what is actually required/able to be relied upon. I'm not normally an XKCD fan, but this strip sums it up perfectly: http://xkcd.com/1172/ http://xkcd.com/1172/ . """Hoon can be classified as a pure, strict higher-order static type-inferred functional language, with co/contra/bivariance and genericity. However, Hoon does not use lambda calculus,""" A higher-order functional language does not "use" the mathematical definition of higher-order functions? In that case, what do you mean by "higher-order functional language"? EDIT: I was going to make an analogy to the hypothetical claim that language X's arithmetic system doesn't use Church numerals (i.e. the mathematical formulation of natural numbers)… but Hoon is actually implemented using Church arithmetic. Go figure. . """unification,""" By what mechanism does Hoon implement type inference? Honestly, that's kind of like saying Hoon doesn't use, say, queues. Great, but, why? . """or other constructs from “PL theory.”""" Disdainful much? I'm really curious what's the background behind the scare quotes here. . EDIT: Just to be clear, I'm not claiming your project is uninteresting or not worth your while. I just feel you're being overly dismissive of the, let's say "traditional" schools of thought, with invalid justification.

urbit 13y ago
As for the logical definition of a "spec," you are welcome to find any inconsistencies or imprecisions in the Nock axioms. Actually someone reported a (cosmetic) bug in the Nock spec this morning, which is quite cool. There's a very important point in that Nock can specify not what a computer computes - but what it has computed, if it terminates. In general, practical systems have to interrupt long-running computations, so they must always compute some subset of that definition. But it can be, and is, a strict subset. I find this a meaningful and accurate statement. Sorry, I didn't mean "PL theory" as scare quotes - I just didn't want to exclude anyone for whom the term doesn't instantly bring to mind a body of work. The truth, though, is that the "PL theory" we have is just one theory of programming. It's a convention, it's not a piece of reality like pi. Church-Turing equivalence tells us that we have infinitely many such representations. Eg, the Turing Machine is equivalent in power to lambda, but much less useful as a programming framework. My feeling is that, as a programming model, lambda suffers from the fact that it was originally designed, by mathematicians, to do mathematics. Just from a UI basis, programmers are not mathematicians. The skill is very similar, but mathematicians work best in geometric and logical abstractions, whereas programmers are more comfortable with mechanical representations. For instance, the general lambda approach is to represent data as code (Church numerals), a very sensible approach from the math side, whereas the Nock approach is to represent code as data - which feels more natural to the programmer. So, nothing can tarnish the very powerful and elegant model of computing that is "PL theory." But it is not "the" theory of computing - just one of infinitely many possible theories.

batemanesque 13y ago

using "teh Internets" on yr front page is a great way to put off anyone who doesn't subscribe to calcified "geek culture"

wgd 13y ago

The more I think about it the more I really like the whole "Jets" concept (although I'm not sold on the name, I'd love to learn that it's a known concept in the PL field with a nicer name). I'd like to see how such an approach would work out for optimizing something more "fundamental" like the Binary Lambda Calculus.

jamii 13y ago
Haskell has rewrite rules which is how eg stream fusion is implemented. http://www.haskell.org/ghc/docs/7.0.1/html/users_guide/rewrite-rules.html http://www.haskell.org/ghc/docs/7.0.1/html/users_guide/rewri...

state 13y ago

If ever there was a right attitude about bringing a radical project in to the world: this is it. I just spent 15 minutes just _reading_ the documentation. Because it's _interesting_. That never happens.

0xdeadbeefbabe 13y ago

Reminds me of the punchline, "consider a spherical cow" > To a Pascal purist, to anyone who thinks mathematically, this seemed hideous. C isn’t really a high-level language at all - it’s a glorified macro assembler. Mankind retreats to the cave. Leaky abstractions are hideous too, don't you think?

melloclello 13y ago

Hey Moldy I just want to say 'ur-bit' is a pretty cool name B-)

eonil 13y ago

Though I couldn't understand them fully... The names are awesome! The concepts are awesome! And the music is awesome!!!

eonil 13y ago
I see some similarity to Smalltalk or Windows PowerShell. And this made me to imagine typed Smalltalk/Objective-C style syntax on shell which would be great for usability...
- offensivehandle 13y ago
  Shell programs are expected to take streams of data and produce other streams of data. Shell programs are also supposed to, but often don't, have uniform configuration options. Instead, we have ps ax | grep chromium | grep -v grep | awk '{print $1}' | xargs kill * ps accepts ax with no - * awk is its own programming language lol * xargs gets pretty complicated if anything bigger than this happens (incidently, I know about awk '/chromium/ {print $1}' and killall. but i have seen that command line in the wild. because some people don't read the awk manual for fun, and i'm not sure if every unix system even has a killall command) ...and yet the shell is still the preferred tool for what it does because everything else requires too much typing (of both varieties) Apparently urbit also has streams of raw data. It's about time someone came up with a new idea for a shell that keeps what's great about the shell (though personally, i would standardize on streaming a form of json, because it turns out that data is very often found as scalars, lists, and mappings). So anyway. If urbit actually ends up being better to live in than unix, and having shell programs that are configured in exactly one way would be an improvement, and having data that's easier to parse than plain text while remaining as easy to read as plain text would also be an improvement, well, I've always wanted to live in a submarine. If it gets a nice editor and c++ compiler, that is. I do need the best performance possible out of my computer for my work.

arh68 13y ago

Would you mind doing lots more screencasts? Maybe writing a jet, rigging a test, profiling, and maybe a bunch of other things. I very much like your demo style, and I have a hunch these docs are going to be pretty dense. ;)

jyf1987 13y ago

so its root in forth?

cdcarter 13y ago

I can't tell what I'm more confused/impressed by, Hoon or the social model. Either way, I've got a destroyer and now I'm trying to understand just how zod works.

losethos 13y ago

Ba ha! Check this out, God, these clowns are fucking with us. God says... informed elephant created Life Prodigality chiefest Volunteers hesitating harmonious thieve owed write fainting withered mirthful thirsted elders external disputes embrace polished salted life- it'd_take_a_miracle restrained sighed sites beholdeth Led Trust required discordant OTHER shines liker husband recollecting pastime restraint unhappy precede wretchedness Tonga sides lords proveth extricate org/gutenberg/etext02 deservings I_didn't_see_that flat Yo readers' caution lodging respite refresh New_Zealand Can weary Thence glue Predicament honouring done groanings fellows worm innocency ETEXT remainder leaven straighten_up hair boink Release illumined sigheth clear You_fix_it infidelity quicken partake Zambia advising Minerva indemnify convertedst do thrustedst Ridiculous suspect conquests computer corrected counted defining ample raven casts boyhood burthened intend births origin 'may voodoo

perlgeek 13y ago

A VM that can be precisely described in 200 words? Does that include the IO subsystem? I have my doubts that it's possible to describe a full set of IO operations that any modern VM needs in so few words, just because of the wealth of features that you usually need (file system access, sockets (TCP and UDP), pipes, IPC, ...)

dancecodes 13y ago

video not work in ff linux

offensivehandle 13y ago
i just finished watching it in firefox on a freshly-installed linux mint 15
- dancecodes 13y ago
  nothing appropriate, gentoo and Im too lazy for fixing it (=^‥^=)

dancecodes 13y ago

without flash of course there

JulianMorrison 13y ago

I love this concept of jets and how it allows a "completely isolated" VM to magically grow connections to the real world.

gwern 13y ago

>I ate something I shouldn't have the other day and ended up having this surreal dream where Mencius Moldbug had gotten tired of the state of the software industry and the Internet and had made his personal solution to it all into an actual piece of working software that was some sort of bizarre synthesis of a peer-to-peer identity and distributed computing platform, an operating system and a programming language. Unfortunately, you needed to figure out an insane system of phoneticized punctuation that got rewritten into a combinator grammar VM code if you wanted to program anything in it. I think there even was a public Github with reams of code in it, but when I tried to read it I realized that my computer was actually a cardboard box with an endless swarm of spiders crawling out of it while all my teeth were falling out, and then I woke up without ever finding out exactly how the thing was supposed to work. http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/ipu/open_thread_september_2329_2013/9szc http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/ipu/open_thread_septemb...

offensivehandle 13y ago

Okay, since you want comments here, here I'll put mine. The reason you were so successful in coming up with a new political philosophy is that your "I'm a Martian" trick got you think thoughts that no respectable person would be caught dead thinking. There aren't the same taboos in computer system design, so while you can refer to the systems people use every day as gigabytes of, what was it, of ass fucking more ass, there's nothing you say that I haven't already heard. I'm still waiting for the Python of functional programming. Paul Graham announced Arc when I was in middle school. Maybe it will be released as the scripting system in Half-Life 3. Being an alien from Alpha Centauri, and observing the growing collection of programming languages, what do you think people keep designing new ones for? Why do some Urplatians argue for Scheme and other Urplatians for Python? Rather than asking the question of 'what is a programming language', and trying to design the axiomatically simplest possible thing, try asking the question of 'how do people use programming languages'. Is your system a bit of syntax regularization away from the pseudocode people scribble on paper to explain algorithms to each other? No, that's Python. Is your system something that compiles down to use the bare metal to its fullest potential while maintaining as much creature comforts as possible? No, that's C++. Is your system something with an ancient history of having a solid ABI, that in fact every other language's ABI is described with? No, that's C. Is your system a heap of cruft upon kludges with the original intention of providing programming access to a hypertext document? That's Javascript. I wouldn't want to write a regex as anything but a regex. In conclusion, you're asking a question that's been asked before and getting an answer that's been gotten before. But, maybe it is finally time for functional programming to come back. Maybe you're a popular enough guy to get people to use your system.

davidgerard 13y ago
"Being an alien from Alpha Centauri, and observing the growing collection of programming languages, what do you think people keep designing new ones for? Why do some Urplatians argue for Scheme and other Urplatians for Python?" Typical mind fallacy. http://lesswrong.com/lw/dr/generalizing_from_one_example/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/dr/generalizing_from_one_example/ Most people model other people as just like themselves, plus or minus a diff. The trouble is that they don't understand just how wide-ranging human thoughts and feelings can be, and assume they will understand and be able to model based on the diff, even if the diff is larger than their whole mind. It's why geeks keep coming up with "intuitively obvious" schemes no-one else can understand, and why engineers are routinely surprised at what actual end users do with their products in user testing. So people write new languages that suit their personal peculiar ways of thinking. Thankfully, many are quite aware that this is what they are doing and don't claim universality. This is why Urbit is art: translating numbers and ASCII characters into nonsense syllables that you are actually expected to pronounce and think in suits Yarvin's mind, even as it leaves me thinking "there is such a thing as being too much of a Borges fan". Which is absolutely fine. But this is why Urbit is art (an expression of a unique personal vision), not anything people are actually going to use without similar levels of confusion to the present. For an example of fully rampant Typical Mind Fallacy in Urbit, see the security document: http://www.urbit.org/2013/08/22/Chapter-6-security.html http://www.urbit.org/2013/08/22/Chapter-6-security.html About two-thirds of the way down, you can actually see Yarvin transform into Moldbug and start pontificating on how humans communicating on a network should work, and never mind the observable evidence of how they actually have behaved whenever each of the conditions he describes have obtained. The very first thing people will do with the Urbit system is try to mess with its assumptions, in ways that its creators literally could not foresee (due to Typical Mind Fallacy), though they might have been reasonably expected to (given the real world as data).