strangest systems I've sent email from

On 29 April 2016 at 21:06, Sean Conner <spc at conman.org> wrote: Fair enough. (So do I, sometimes, incidentally.) But my impression is that it's only a thing among the weirdos, not in industry or mainstream academia. :( Sounds like a step back towards older times, and as such, I fear it is very unlikely. The story of ARX, the unfinished Acorn OS in Modula-2 for the then-prototype Archimedes, is similar. No, it probably wouldn't have been all that radical. I wonder how much of Amiga OS' famed performance, compactness, etc. was a direct result of its adaptation to the MMU-less 68000, and thus could never have been implemented in a way that could have been made more robust on later chips such as the 68030? Ah, yes, I've read much of that. I agree. Mind you, Taos was similarly mind-blowing for me. Yeah. :-( I think elements of it are still around, too. Well, yes, exactly. That is precisely what I'm saying. I am not sure I'm the person to try to summarise it. I've nicked my own effort from my tech blog: I've not tried Urbit. (Yet.) But my impression is this: It's not obfuscatory for the hell of it. It is, yes, but for a valid reason: that he doesn't want to waste time explaining or supporting it. It's hard because you need to be v v bright to fathom it; obscurity is a user filter. He claims NOT to be a Lisp type, not to have known anything much about the language or LispMs, & to have re-invented some of the underlying ideas independently. I'm not sure I believe this. My view of it from a technical perspective is this. (This may sound over-dramatic.) We are so mired in the C world that modern CPUs are essentially C machines. The conceptual model of C, of essentially all compilers, OSes, imperative languages, &c. is a flawed one -- it is too simple an abstraction. Q.v. http://www.loper-os.org/?p=55 The LispM model was a better one, because it's slightly richer. That's "slightly" in the St Exupery sense, i.e. "?perfection is attained not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing more to remove." Instead of bytes & blocks of them, the basic unit is the list. Operations are defined in terms of lists, not bytes. You define a few very simple operations & that's all you need. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3482389/how-many-primitives-does-it-take… The way LispMs worked, AIUI, is that the machine language wasn't Lisp, it was something far simpler, but designed to map onto Lisp concepts. I have been told that modern CPU design & optimisations & so on map really poorly onto this set of primitives. That LispM CPUs were stack machines, but modern processors are register machines. I am not competent to judge the truth of this. If Yarvin's claims are to be believed, he has done 2 intertwined things: [1] Experimentally or theoretically worked out something akin to these primitives. [2] Found or worked out a way to map them onto modern CPUs. This is his "machine code". Something that is not directly connected or associated with modern CPUs' machine languages. He has built something OTHER but defined his own odd language to describe it & implement it. He has DELIBERATELY made it unlike anything else so you don't bring across preconceptions & mental impurities. You need to start over. The basic layer is both foundation & insulation. It's technological insulation, a barrier between the byte machine underneath & the list-oriented layer on top. It's also conceptual insulation, to make you re-learn how to work. But, as far as I can judge, the design is sane, clean, & I am taking it that he has reasons for the weirdness. I don't think it's gratuitous. So what on a LispM was the machine language, in Urbit, is Nock. It's a whole new machine language layer, placed on top of an existing OS stack, so I'm not surprised if it's horrendously inefficient. Compare with Ternac, a trinary computer implemented as a simulation on a binary machine. It's that big a change. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ternac Then, on top of this layer, he's built a new type of OS. This seems to have conceptual & architectural analogies with LispM OSes such as Genera. Only Yarvin claims not to be a Lisper, so he's re-invented that wheel. That is Hoon. But he has an Agenda. Popehat explained it well here: https://popehat.com/2013/12/06/nock-hoon-etc-for-non-vulcans-why-urbit-matt… ? via the medium of this sig: Timothy C. May, Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero knowledge, reputations, information markets, black markets, collapse of government. I would be interested in an effort to layer a bare-metal-up LispM-type layer on top of x86, ARM, &c. But Yarvin isn't here for the sheer techno-wanking. Oh no. He wants to reinvent the world, via the medium of encryption, digital currencies, &c. So he has a whole other layer on top of Urbit, which is the REASON for Urbit -- a secure, P2P, encrypted, next-gen computer system which happens to run on existing machines & over the existing Internet, because that's the available infrastructure, & whereas it's a horrid mess, it's what is there. You can't ignore it, you can't achieve these grandiose goals within it, so, you just layer your new stuff over the top. I hope that makes some kind of sense. -- Liam Proven ? Profile: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? GMail/G+/Twitter/Flickr/Facebook: lproven MSN: lproven at hotmail.com ? Skype/AIM/Yahoo/LinkedIn: liamproven Cell/Mobiles: +44 7939-087884 (UK) ? +420 702 829 053 (?R)