urbit

14 ms·

91.
by urbit 12y ago
Perhaps it makes a bit more sense if it's explained that the original goal was to keep the whole codebase (outside of the C support layer, which adds no semantics) at 10Kloc. Unfortunately this is now rapidly slipping toward 20. Of co
92.
by urbit 12y ago
I'm quite confident that Eliezer would object strenuously to this characterization!
93.
by urbit 12y ago
I think the classic analogy is "grep." But they are commented, at least: ++ pimp :: traced request $: ful=? :: | === HEAD fur=(unit mark) :: type goal hen=duct :: event
94.
by urbit 12y ago
Why would you write a new Nock back-end at the same time as a compiler for a new language? Even if you did, you'd want to test the new interpreter with the old language, and the new language with the old interpreter, before going any
95.
by urbit 12y ago
Suppose we wrote this with keywords. I can't stomach a naked keyword so I'll put a colon on the front. We might write: :function lax { :object :tuple{her: ship dur: dore} { :function cluy { :produce :tuple
96.
by urbit 12y ago
Good lord, no! Hoon has no reserved words at all. The nonsense words are all names. This is entirely a style choice. The actual name syntax is roughly Lisp's - for instance, (my-long-function arg1 arg2) does the same thing (roughly)
97.
by urbit 12y ago
I wouldn't say it's based on SKI - just relatively similar. There are a lot of ways to skin this cat. SKI is obviously a lot simpler mathematically, but I wouldn't want to try to use it as a compiler target...
98.
by urbit 12y ago
IANAM, but I thought really if there was one great lesson of 20th-century mathematics, it's that nothing (ie, no system of axioms) is fundamental and superior to all others. For instance, Church-Turing equivalence does not tell you th
99.
by urbit 12y ago
Stepping away from the Algol keyword tradition is obviously a risk. At the same time, after using a keyword-free syntax for a while, reserved words feel really weird. Someone just emailed and pointed out that he couldn't check out Urb
100.
by urbit 12y ago
You can represent them symbolically, of course, as you do for instance in XML.
101.
by urbit 12y ago
Yes - although actually achieving this result in practice (and efficiently) takes a lot of doing right.
102.
by urbit 12y ago
Excellent question! One, as we know from Church-Turing equivalence, lambda and infinitely many other models of computing have the same expressive power. That doesn't mean they have the same practical utility, though. Lambda in its Lis
103.
by urbit 12y ago
Or as I sometimes say: "on the bottom it's a new kind of math, on the top it's a new kind of social network." This is kind of shameless hype but not as much as you might think. Sounds like a 10-year research project, ri
104.
by urbit 13y ago
Edith Piaf said it best: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fFtGfyruroU
105.
by urbit 13y ago
House is an OS in a very different sense than Urbit - the "boots on bare metal" sense. The core of House is a monad which represents the hardware state of a common Intel box. Urbit is intended to run virtually in the cloud and is
106.
by urbit 13y ago
Thanks again for the advice. Do you have a link to House? I wish people naming projects would realize that the Internet is dead and all we have is the Googlenet...
107.
by urbit 13y ago
Sorry our site sucks. We released accidentally and are more or less in "semi-stealth mode." You probably shouldn't be interested yet. Unless you like playing with semi-broken stuff. When it's not broken we'll let
108.
by urbit 13y ago
"This trick is well known to old-style functional programmers, they waffle on about Y combinators and eat this stuff for breakfast, but it’s the kind of stuff that gives functional programming a bad name. Try explaining this to first y
109.
by urbit 13y ago
Oh, fine. Actually I mean codomain, because it's a conservative algorithm...
110.
by urbit 13y ago
I agree with your goals but not with your observations. Perhaps I'm biased by the fact that I have small children. I am regularly amazed by their ability to memorize words, numbers, symbols, etc, combined with complete incompetence a
111.
by urbit 13y ago
That's a truly amazing effort to take on the OS problem from a theorem-proving standpoint. I of course would try to attack the same problem on a theory-indifferent substrate. But... +1 for an exciting vision of math uber alles.
112.
by urbit 13y ago
It is an understandable comment. Maybe we'll rethink it. Bad taste is a social construct, but you live in the society you live in... On the other hand, the identity dialogue defaults unwary bros to %lady, which certainly ought to cau
113.
by urbit 13y ago
We have an asymmetry of discourse here, because you want me to take your disparaging remarks seriously. You also seem not at all concerned about your own appearance. Yes, there is a purpose to the disparaging remarks. The purpose is to
114.
by urbit 13y ago
My definition of "rigorous and disciplined" comes from an entirely different world, the world of RFCs. Here, you can look at my axioms and identify anything unrigorous or undisciplined about them: https://github.com&#x2
115.
by urbit 13y ago
The ugly reality is that because of the actual mistakes the PL world (or even "academia" at large) makes, anything smelling of that world often is dismissed without a second glance. Even when it has genuine merit. Tikhonj is righ
116.
by urbit 13y ago
Basically, I'd say, ordinary human beings are much better at memorizing words and symbols than most smart people think - and much worse at understanding highly abstract concepts. Think of the number of things you need to memorize to be
117.
by urbit 13y ago
An automatic castrator is an excellent safety device for your steer pen. Generally we don't actually use these functions unless we're normalizing foreign data. Then, we do. Because anyone on the Internets can send a bull into
118.
by urbit 13y ago
It does. And the best I can say is that I'm genuinely interested in the results of my experiment. It would certainly be an interesting practical experiment to try to adapt a conventional syntax to the same semantics, or even to discar
119.
by urbit 13y ago
I don't think so, but I wouldn't know enough to tell you. I can tell you that I am not very interested in 20th-century formal logic, at least as a way of defining programming, but you knew that. I think it seems like a logical e
120.
by urbit 13y ago
Some UI burdens seem high, some are high. An interesting class of UI problem is the set of things that intuitively look difficult, but actually aren't. Human brains are incredibly good at raw memorization of associations. Hoon has ab

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