urbit

15 ms·

31.
by urbit 11y ago
Given that the leap-second problem exists, this is the right technical way to deal with it. Unfortunately I've never seen anyone doing this, but they should. (Of course it'd be ideal if humans were willing to abandon their silly
32.
by urbit 11y ago
TLDR: if you define a bunch of complexity into your definition of time, you'll have a very complex model of time. Eg, if you define the Gregorian calendar as a function of the position of the planets, rather than a function from atomic
33.
by urbit 11y ago
Yes, this equates to TAI minus 35 seconds. GPS did exactly the same thing (instantiated at a TAI offset equal to UTC), perhaps in a vain hope that the astronomers would give up their death-grip on time. Not sure the difference between 35
34.
Urbit language tutorial, chapter 2 (syntax)(urbit.org)
6 points by urbit 11y ago|0 comments
35.
Urbit language tutorial, chapter 1(urbit.org)
11 points by urbit 11y ago|1 comments
36.
by urbit 11y ago
Most awesome paragraph: One blinker is associated with the mouse: when you slide the mouse along a surface, that blinker moves in a corresponding direction. When the mouse is moved very rapidly, the mouse blinker gets big like Godzilla in
37.
by urbit 11y ago
Speaking from experience, I guarantee you that anyone who starts saying "centis" instead of "percent equals," whether in the context of Hoon or Haskell lenses or anything, will never go back. I have to force myself to &
38.
by urbit 11y ago
That's pretty much what a mold is. The syntax is written to look as much as possible like the description of a set, but the semantics are that you're actually defining a function.
39.
by urbit 11y ago
I want to stick to ordinary American high-school math as I remember it. I learned "domain" and "range" in high school. I don't know anyone who defines these terms as something different. When I hear "project
40.
by urbit 11y ago
The next tutorial is a lot less wordy, and should hopefully shed a good amount of light backward on this one.
41.
by urbit 11y ago
Cells make you think of a+bi a little bit, but no. (Actually I was very pleased when I realized that signed integers have no place in a fundamental interpreter.)
42.
by urbit 11y ago
We're at a pretty shallow level of disagreement here, because you'd just add descriptive names to the combinator definitions. I'm not sure this would improve the learning curve much if at all, but it couldn't hurt much
43.
by urbit 11y ago
It is right! You do have clue! This is excellent feedback. Normally I'd agree with it. Ideally, this will be the last cliffhanger in the tutorial...
44.
by urbit 11y ago
Yeah, that's pretty accurate.
45.
by urbit 11y ago
My own math background is limited enough that this magic word doesn't naturally occur to me, though I do know what it means. That's usually a red flag for me; I want to keep the level of modern math required really, really low. I
46.
by urbit 11y ago
Nock: http://urbit.org/docs/dev/nock
47.
by urbit 11y ago
From OP, in the section "Our first mold": After seeing a few span examples, are we ready to describe the set of all spans with a Hoon mold? Well, no, but let's try it anyway. Ignore the syntax (which we'll explain late
48.
by urbit 11y ago
The runes (a) help you remember the combinators, and (b) are two characters long. To get to reasonably precise, meaningful keyword bindings for this set of combinators in particular, perhaps you'd be replacing ":-", ":_&
49.
by urbit 11y ago
"Nouns don't have cycles" in two senses. Abstractly, a noun as defined is a tree and trees don't have cycles. So there! :-) Concretely, the Nock interpreter, which Hoon compiles itself to, has no way to construct a &quo
50.
by urbit 11y ago
As soon as the nginx cache times out, the offending text will read: A noun is an atom or a cell. An atom is any unsigned integer. A cell is an ordered pair of nouns. Nouns are trees; they have no cycles. Noun comparison is always by va
51.
by urbit 11y ago
Yes! Although there are some things Lisp did 50 years ago, that aren't here. But this is less an improvement on Lisp, than a tribute to Lisp. Chapter 1 should remind you less of Lisp. Although I do expect to hear "that's j
52.
by urbit 11y ago
Back up.
53.
by urbit 11y ago
This works fine for C, which is a keyword language. What you'll find if you look at Hoon is about 100 combinator runes, which are digraphs like "%=" ("centis") or "|-" ("barhep"). (There is of c
54.
by urbit 11y ago
Thanks for the detailed feedback! As of sentence #3, it looks like a noun can contain cycles. I mean, it can be a cell, and a cell can contain nouns, so that seems like a cycle. Then, in sentence #5, I'm told they don't have cycl
55.
by urbit 11y ago
But worse ? I assure you that we're not shipping Urbit with non-standard keyboards printed with "com" rather than ",". If these syllables rub you the wrong way, you're perfectly free to pronounce them any way
56.
by urbit 11y ago
Happy to take PRs if you feel you can write it better. One of these paragraphs has to come before the other. "Mathy" probably should have a link to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Type_theory . My experience i
57.
by urbit 11y ago
See the comment above; it's nice not to need a separate framework. At least, for Urbit to Urbit networking. Of course there's nothing stopping you from encoding or decoding anyone else's protocols in Urbit. Or vice versa.
58.
by urbit 11y ago
CP is one of many IDLs [1]. IDLs are great, but there is always an impedance mismatch in translating a language's native data structures to a language-independent IDL. Someone has to do this work, though there are sometimes various s
59.
by urbit 11y ago
How many times a day do you want to say "percent equals" or "tilde ampersand," rather than "centis" or "sigpam"? Worse, you may not spend a lot of time reading code out loud, but when you read your b
60.
by urbit 11y ago
From OP: One obstacle to learning Hoon is that it has two quite distinct concepts that might equally be called a "type." Worse, most other typed functional languages are mathy and share a basically mathematical concept of "t

More ›