this is awesome! it fits well with a lot of the (mental) notes I made tracing Urbit history as part of a deconstruction of the earlier inroads technofascism made into the wider tech world. some loose notes to expand on a couple topics:
very little of Urbit is actually original. the language itself (called hoon if I remember correctly) is a lambda-calculus-heavy ML with a Lisp-style type system and runtime, with all the names changed to blur the line between Yarvin’s bad ideas and the ideas from computer science that Yarvin implemented poorly
notably, hoon inherits the computational inefficiency of lambda calculus but none of the safety of ML or the usability of Lisp. the resulting language is an awful cacophony
these sources were most likely used not because Yarvin is any good at functional programming, but because Urbit was a partially successful attempt to insert yarvin’s ideas into the conversation on places like hacker news, where paul graham primed a bunch of folks to accept both Lisp and right-wing libertarianism as the same bundle of ideas
the few unique parts of Urbit are interesting only in that they seem to be early attempts at things we’ve seen done by other techfash projects. for example, Urbit claims to be decentralized, but hoon programs are permanently linked to code controlled by the Urbit foundation (most likely still owned by Yarvin even though they claim otherwise), which compliant Urbit implementations must pull from the network (also controlled by the foundation). this allows programs to be effectively broken on the whim of whoever controls their access to their upstream dependencies, effectively making whoever controls the foundational Urbit libraries the rulers of Urbit’s neo-feudal network — and it’s built so that swapping out those dependencies is as hard as possible. I haven’t checked the implementation to see if it prevents changing the meaning of downstream programs yet (because hoon code is brain rot — see the example linked above)
I need to dig through Reddit and find the AMA, but yarvin claims that Urbit is the first and only functional language that can pull functions and dependencies from the network. this is false and he probably knows it — Eelco Dolstra’s foundational paper on the Nix package manager was published (this is from memory, probably not accurate) about a year and a half before Yarvin’s first blog post on Urbit, and there are enough similarities between the two that I don’t know if I want to call this a coincidence
last time I brought this up on r/SneerClub, some weird fascist found the post and made the mistake of linking Yarvin’s original blog posts, which are kind of hilarious. I’ll dig them up and link them here when I can
yarvin’s Reddit AMA warning: high level of smarmy fascists. I can’t find the post where he claims Urbit is the only networked functional language so it might be elsewhere
the original Urbit spec, lots to sneer at here as yarvin decides Urbit is best described as how neo-feudal martians would write software
@dgerard linked this in the masto thread but it’s too important not to link: one of Yarvin’s later tech specs with less obfuscation, which literally calls the network address space digital feudalism
e: holy shit I revisited that last link
The $2^64 question is thus: who are the dukes?
My answer is simple. The dukes are the developers of Urbit. They created it - they get to own it. This is standard Lockean libertarian homesteading theory. Lend a hand - earn a slice. Thus Urbit, unlike most open-source projects, offers a rational motivation for contribution.
this is the most mask off description of the fake decentralization crypto projects build on (and Urbit might have invented, unless we can dig up prior art) I’ve ever seen
@self at one point we tried to figure out how to make Urbit, like, do anything, and every time we got close, yarvin would move something around. we eventually caught on and walked away, hopefully less than a footnote in their history
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