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Comment by SrslyJosh | Hacker News Reader

The project is exclusionary by design--instead of using an existing programming language or even keywords/terminology from an existing human language, the creator decided to make everything up, right down to new names for existing symbols. F'r example:

gar >

hax #

hep -

kel {

sel [

ser ]

sig ~

soq '

Have to agree about the screenshots--if there's something useful here, why not show it off?

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It may be marketing genius if the goal is to appeal to the type of nerd who loves obscure systems and occult jargon... the kind that geeks out on the complexities of D&D while chatting you up about the rococo details of Eastern Orthodox dietary restrictions and how they may have impacted renaissance fashion. Everything about Urbit seems designed to be candy to these types.

The cybertruck os before cybertruk existed.

Sign me up!

I'll admit, it did appeal to me in that way. But the other part of me just felt like it was snake oil. Being intentionally vague in order to not reveal some crucial flaw.

I've learned a bit more about it from these comments and I don't think it's snake oil, but it is 100% not what I was expecting from the language used in the copy.

So yeah, seems like a good project that foregoes familiarity in order to create something cool albeit niche. But anyone who isn't on board with the vague descriptions will definitely feel mislead.

In fact, most of the naming in Urbit is deliberately meaningless and bizarre in order to prevent the project from congealing too soon. The intention is to keep things provisional and annoying enough that future programmers won't forget to revise past temporary decisions.

D&D isn't necessarily that complex, systematically, if you really lay it out. It's about shared imagination with your friends, mutually improvising a story, and a framework for actualising personal development.

I'm not helping, am I.

Ted Blackman (one of the Urbit developers) recently posted a puzzle on Twitter, asking people to describe what a piece of code (written in this phonetic representation) does. [1]

I was delighted to find that I still remembered the phonetic names after first reading of them back in 2013, though I got the exact result wrong.

[1] https://twitter.com/rovnys/status/1199958608483684352

Canonical pronunciation for each character is a wonderful thing, and I use it all the time to discuss code. If there's one thing other projects should steal from Urbit, it's this.

Spoken programming languages FTW.

The pronunciations are no more exclusionary than learning Cyrillic, and the effort pays off.

That actually does sound really cool. I guess we get close to that with names for operators e.g. Python's walrus operator. I can definitely see it being nice to have that sort of granularity.

The pronunciations are no more exclusionary than learning Cyrillic, and the effort pays off.

Oddly, I have never been required to learn Cyrillic to use any of many, many other programming languages out there.

People who don't use Latin alphabet have been forced to learn it to use pretty much any programming language out there.

You can find the rest of the ASCII symbol names (there's 34 in total) here:

https://urbit.org/docs/tutorials/hoon/hoon-syntax/

For what it's worth, some people apparently read code differently than other people -- some subvocalize these symbols -- and reprogramming your brain to use short names for symbols might be very useful. I'd guess some other people have compressed mathematical symbols to an unvocalizable mental representation.

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