no excerpts yet cause work destroyed me, but this just got posted on the orange site. apparently a couple of urbit devs realized urbit sucks actually. interestingly they correctly call out some of urbit’s worst points (like its incredibly high degree of centralization), but I get the strong feeling that this whole thing is an attempt to launder urbit’s reputation while swapping out the fascists in charge
e: I also have to point out that this is written from the insane perspective that anyone uses urbit for anything at all other than an incredibly inefficient message board and a set of interlocking crypto scams
e2: I didn’t link it initially, but the orange site thread where I found this has heated up significantly since then
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PLAN is an evaluation model for a purely-functional database.
Actually, this “purely-functional database” phrase is a bit misleading, it’s an attempt to describe a novel programming paradigm for which we don’t yet have good vocabulary.
this novel programming paradigm is just urbit’s badly plagiarized Nix store combined with Nix’s lazy evaluation semantics and large parts of Nix’s syntax (with pointless extra bits stuck on, as is tradition). not one citation in the whole thing, of course
and these fucking doofuses still use Nix to build their shit! they’re gonna claim with a straight face this bullshit is so novel they can barely describe it?
but also, y’all wanna see what Lisp s-expressions look like on urbit brain?
holy fuck this one is just painful
e: imagine if Lisp looked like this fucking cacophony (a basic HTTP hello world that uses a bunch of library functions for the difficult parts)
Tuple<"Do you expect these chucklefucks to ever release a full stable 1.0 let alone 2.0?", "Perhaps one day Urbitals will release a text I'm simultaneously drunk enough and not too drunk to read.">BTW the latter string in English evaluates to
false.Urbit is a ball of mud
Can’t say I disagree.
I didn’t find the thread you are talking about, but I found this instead, which is probably much worse.
(Edit: I did eventually find the thread!)
oh christ, that’s worth its own thread if you’d like to post one
the original thread for this one had 4 points and 0 comments at the time so I didn’t link it, but I probably should have in case it picked up. I’ll try and find it again
my mistake, there’s gold in the orange site thread
e: ah, we found it around the same time!
The power here is supposedly that no authority can override your desires on your plunder system because it will eventually be a frozen spec, and so virtual machine runtime implementations that are correct must run any program from any time after the freeze. That means a vm I make today will run programs a thousand years from now (probably inefficiently) and a vm created in a thousand years must run programs from today. Theoretically speaking.
Yes that’s what a spec means. Like wow I can write
puts("Hello, world!")and it does the same thing on every ANSI C compiler, how novel!this is an incredibly bad idea for security of course, and is in any case is a garbage version of what javascript VMs already do successfully (much to javascript’s detriment, in some cases)
Dev is asked why it’s called “Plunder”
Think of it as being a Scheme implementation: Racket, Stalin, Larceny, Plunder.
TBH this is the first time I’ve heard of a Scheme named after the notorious Soviet dictator. What’s next, a Lisp called Hitler?
it’s weird that they omitted the historical MIT projects that led to scheme (PLANNER, Conniver, SCHEME(r, they ran into a filename length limit when implementing)) but found time to mention an obscure Lisp with no impact that stopped updating 16 years ago
maybe cause in the actual historical context of Lisp-1 names, “plunder” doesn’t even fit the pattern
Omfg I have a coworker who writes stuff like this it’s actually uncanny
I am just now learning about Urbit 🤔
I am sorry.
