Hidduc Posmeg's Hoon Tutorials – The Urbit Programming Langauge | Hacker News Reader

Hidduc Posmeg's Hoon Tutorials – The Urbit Programming Langauge

hidduc-posmeg.urbit.org

33 pointskruhft15 comments

These are some useful but quite unofficial tutorials written by ~hidduc-posmeg, who's probably asleep right now. It's always pathetic when your users shame you into documentation by reverse-engineering the system and writing their own. (See also: https://github.com/laanwj/urbit-tools)

These are markdown files served from ~hidduc-posmeg's own planet and converted to HTML by urbit, proxied by ~hidduc-posmeg's star ~doznec. Since this system isn't actually supposed to be live yet, hidduc-posmeg.urbit.org is DNSed to doznec.urbit.org; ~doznec talks to ~hidduc-posmeg over Urbit's own network, an encrypted P2P protocol (%ames). Ideally, hidduc-posmeg.urbit.org would DNS to the actual Unix server the planet is running on, for obvious reasons.

This whole thing, like http://www.urbit.org, would fall over in a few seconds of HN traffic if it wasn't behind an nginx cache. However, if you look at your network window you should see a long-poll. If ~hidduc-posmeg edits zir tutorials from vim on zir Unix server and saves, this will drive an update event that'll propagate forward and refresh your browser. You can see this in action in our demos...

> zir

did you have a stroke?

I'm not normally a huge fan of gender-neutral pronouns, but you have heard of pseudonymity?

~hidduc-posmeg is an HN user with a very definite gender, but doxing is bad karma and avoiding pronouns is cumbersome. So, why not?

In a system where you choose your own handle, you tend to gender it. But when your "name" is just a number in a phonetic base, it seems like a pity to sacrifice any of its delicious opacity. This obviously shouldn't be read as some sort of taking sides in some culture war or other...

A gender-neutral pronoun that is not also a common name would be "They." People named Ze and Xe may not appreciate becoming pronouns.

"They" is fine, though clunky at times. It is important to note that some persons may be triggered by nontraditional gender-neutral pronouns.

No markdown about it - it's a ford page, and the example code is actually compiled and evaluated along with everything else.

Urbit is secretly much cooler than you give it credit for...

Doh! Yeah, another thing Urbit is ok at is generating HTML. If you were designing a language, especially a language that's basically in some sense a Lisp, in 2015, you'd probably want custom syntax for XML-shaped data, to avoid having to use a separate template syntax...

>If you want to use a webpage, which will allow you to use the tall forms of the runes, then you'll need to setup up a page to work in. First get the code from: https://bitbucket.org/zaphar/hoon-intro. Then you will need to copy the lib.hoon file into your urbit instance's desk, By first mounting the desk onto your filesystem.

...am I the only person who has absolutely no idea what this guy is talking about?

>Gates are a of type core that have only one arm with the empty name '$'.

Okay

No, you're not alone. It made me feel like I've missed out on the past 30 years of computing, like they never happened like I remember them, or like I'm suddenly in a parallel universe. Quite scary. I guess I sound like that to some people too, some times.

So probably no one is still reading this. But I'm the author.

I enjoy investigating new languages and technologies. These tutorials were built while I was doing that for urbit. They probably read like a foreign language to some folks. It does assume a little bit of familiarity with nock and urbit servers.

Totally off-topic, but about 10 years ago I played an MMO called Star Wars Galaxies. My character's name was Zaphar Waverunner (at this point I can't remember if it was a totally random name from their generator or if I modified one in homage to Zaphod Beeblebrox). I'd never seen that word in another context until I saw one of your posts here recently.

My name was absolutely modified in homage to Zaphod Beeblebrox. Zaphod was already taken for some reason so I modified it to Zaphar instead and it's been that ever since.

The "we'll release this to the public when it's finished" mentality is what's causing this project to fail.

Urbit sounds really cool, but it needs people to actually get used to it, understand it, and then parse it and explain it for us mortals.

It's certainly not ready now, but they released a whitepaper and it's open to the public, both in terms of source and joining the network. Anyone is free to get used to it and use it, as evident as this tutorial by a member of the community.

I honestly think you're absolutely right. Some people have pushed through our "unreleased" status and have learned quite a bit anyway. The guy who wrote these tutorials is not one of urbit's primary devs, but he still managed to get a pretty decent grasp on the system, and he even wrote some great doc.

We're generally quite responsive on the urbit-dev mailing list, and we're making a concerted effort to be more helpful everywhere. Urbit is one of those projects that can't succeed without a community. The pace of github pull requests from outside contributors is increasing, and more and more docs are coming out, both from the core dev team and outside contributors.

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