I like a lot of the ideas, both on the merit of being weird and fun and genuinely being better.
The view of having an operating system that has:
* a built-in identity system and PKI
* a typed and versioned file system
* a typed command line
* all apps being state machines (both being able to be upgrades over the air and operating based entirely on RPC primitives)
* having the entire thing be a function on an atomically updated event log that is crash-proof, upgradable without a restart, and replayable
is just great, even if it's not really usable yet. I'm not sure how feasible the entire project is, because holy hell is it ambitious, but I really hope they do well.
Playing around with Hoon is actually pretty nice. Reading it as a beginner is scary as hell due to all the weird runes, but learning it is nowhere as hard as it looks. It's vaguely lisp-like, pure and side-effect free, strongly typed, and easy to use. I've been doing codegolf challenges in it for fun on my free time.
I want to get into Urbit like you have, everything you've said is appealing to me.
It's just like it's like reading the Lord of the Rings or the Bible. There is this book. It is really important to its fandom. It's affected everything else. It has massive scale and scope. Your feeling is that it's not going to be a light read.
So far I'm intimidated into skulking around the edges but hopefully not for long.
Bravo explorer!
You know even if we only got an PKI going that would be revolutionary. The 'modern' world hasn't a hope in hell of achieving that any time this century.
Any resources you found helpful? A google search on "hoon tutorial" seems to produce mainly urbit.org broken links. Does one need a galaxy/invite/whatever to be able to build it and play with it?
urbit.org[0] has new Hoon tutorial docs, and it's really helpful to ask questions in :talk if you get stuck. The people there are friendly and will try to answer any questions you have.
You don't need an invite to be able to play around with it, you'll just have to use a comet (which is the functionally same, but you have an uglier name). If you ask in :talk they'd probably send you a planet ticket, too.
I like a lot of the ideas, both on the merit of being weird and fun and genuinely being better. The view of having an operating system that has: * a built-in identity system and PKI * a typed and versioned file system * a typed command line * all apps being state machines (both being able to be upgrades over the air and operating based entirely on RPC primitives) * having the entire thing be a function on an atomically updated event log that is crash-proof, upgradable without a restart, and replayable
is just great, even if it's not really usable yet. I'm not sure how feasible the entire project is, because holy hell is it ambitious, but I really hope they do well.
Playing around with Hoon is actually pretty nice. Reading it as a beginner is scary as hell due to all the weird runes, but learning it is nowhere as hard as it looks. It's vaguely lisp-like, pure and side-effect free, strongly typed, and easy to use. I've been doing codegolf challenges in it for fun on my free time.