For me, it's the language that it's advocates use to describe it, I have yet to see an explanation of what it does, let alone what it is or how it works or what problems it's supposed to solve.
Every discussion of Urbit clips my bullshitometer.
I thought this stuff was so silly too until I read Yarvins resignation letter.
It goes someways to explain the esoteric nature of the tooling.
He sets out quite eloquently the reasons for it;
1. Laziness (which I think is a modest way of saying it wasn’t a priority to make the names good while they still tinker on it).
2. It’s not ready for prime time - urbit is becoming popular before it’s anywhere near ready for consumers. The esotericism helps keep people away who would be burned by an unpolished first experience.
3. Some of the things are conceptually new and given placeholder names that will be changed later when their purpose is better understood.
I actually think while building this stuff the reasons given make a lot of sense, especially the part about laziness - the idea of urbit contains some new concepts and it’s probably not a good idea to wed names to tools before they have been given time to be fleshed out.
i understand it as a pure functional OS running on a pure functional VM with a pure functional memory model (tree not buffer). IO is event sourced and thus the computer is deterministic. That makes possible some new stuff on top that any sensible person would do, so they did it.
It's an esoteric language artificially coupled to a finite pki designed to enrich early founders.
The language part doesn't allow anything new, nor does it do anything better - it's most similar to a lisp machine, but written in a much, much less expressive language.
It would be harmless if not for the pki part. It lives on ethereum anyway, it has no excuse to exist. Eth addresses or ens would work as well, but without the ponzi mechanics.
What does this response even mean? How can a language be coupled to PKI? Does the language implement it, or is it predicated on some implementation? How can that even "live on" ethereum in the first place?
What kind of fucked up problem statement results in this jargon bingo card being applicable?
The language itself is not coupled to the PKI. The PKI ("azimuth") is implemented as a contract on Ethereum. The OS ("arvo"), implemented in the language ("hoon"), has a networking module that respects the PKI, but also affords for (practically) infinite not-PKI-registered identities.
A lot of people have written, fairly persuasively, about this on HN over the years ('lisper in particular has some good stuff). I'd just use the search bar rather than recapitulating the whole thing ever time this system comes up; better to keep this conversation about the work this person did, and not about whatever it is Yarvin is trying to do.
This actually made me interested in trying out the project. It's very beautiful.