I've been seeing this off and on for about a year now and I still have no idea if this is legit or some long-con troll type thing. Anyone care to shed some light on it?
Urbit is postmodern computer science (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postmodernism). It is not intended to be a troll, but it is intended to be deliberately obscure so that only the elites will "get it". My personal opinion is that the emperor has no clothes, but I wouldn't bet my entire life savings on it. Curtis is crazy, but he's not an idiot.
There are some interesting similarities between Urbit and... the Church of Scientology.
Like Yarvin, L.Ron Hubbard made up a lot of new terminology for things that had perfecly good names before.
Like Urbit, in order to be able to be able to read for yourself what it's really all about, you're made to invest, heavily and up front.
The psychology of that is astounding. Scientology's formerly inaccessible teachings have been leaked, and nobody who reads that stuff unprepared comes away impressed. Scientologists, however, do NOT complain, "This is what you have gotten a decade's worth of earnings for from me? RLY???"
A large investment of time and effort seems to make people psychologically predisposed to accept as valuable whatever is revealed at the end (and tell outsiders that it all has been very much worth it.)
Urbit is not intended to be deliberately obscure. Communication is hard, especially with such radically new ideas. That's why we're building this repository, to lower the barrier to entry. Urbit is vast and new and often difficult to comprehend, but if there's any way we can help you guys understand it, let us know.
> Urbit is not intended to be deliberately obscure.
Well, you sure fooled me.
> Communication is hard, especially with such radically new ideas.
No, it's actually not. You start with a description of the problem you're trying to solve. Then you go on to explain why existing solutions don't solve it. Then you describe your solution, and what it is about your solution that solves the problem where previous attempts have failed. It's really quite straightforward. If you can't do it, that's a pretty good indication that you don't actually understand what you're doing.
> if there's any way we can help you guys understand it, let us know
A white paper would help a lot.
But since you asked, here are a few specific questions:
1. What problem is Urbit supposed to solve?
2. What is the benefit of reinventing computer science from the ground up with nock and hoon? Why not start from an established base like C or Lisp or Scheme or Haskell or even the lambda calculus if you want to be purists about it? (Surely someone on the Urbit team has heard of Turing-equivalence?)
3. If your intention is not to be obscure, why do you employ overwhelmingly obscure terminology and punctuation? Why do you use ultra-short identifiers in your code? At a casual browse I can't find even one identifier in your code longer than five characters. (You do know that you can get more than 640k of RAM nowadays, yes?)
I'm sorry for the snark, but I find Urbit incredibly frustrating. Curtis is very smart, which is pretty much the only reason that I don't just come right out and call shenanigans. But Urbit has been pegging my bogometer for a very long time.
At a casual browse I can't find even one identifier in your code longer than five characters.
I found an identifier named "sivtyv-barnel", so apparently six-letter words are also allowed as long as the resulting name sounds like a Norwegian actress.
Yes, which is one of the a whole host of other reasons to stay away from this. Urbit openly states that it has backdoors in place to allow policing by any government.
Reading this is so strange feeling. Its like weird science fiction or something where many of the important words are made up, but the rest is normal English.
