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Comment by chubot | Hacker News Reader

Not OP, and I don't understand Urbit particularly well, but I think this part of the doc is the salient feature:

> The data model of Nock is the noun (*), which is either a natural number (@, called an "atom") or a pair of nouns

> The noun is famously simple; it competes with the list as the simplest possible recursive datatype

All code and all data is like that. So to me it's basically a Lisp-y networked operating system.

This also makes it very inefficient, which the doc explains. But the idea is to build everything on top of the most minimal axioms, which never change.

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I can’t find the doc or post but it’s old. It’s 10 lines of code that resemble all ops you need for computation. Pseudo code but it refers to itself in an interesting Quine way.

http://moronlab.blogspot.com/2010/01/urbit-functional-progra... Isn’t the link I was looking for but I think it’s the blog.

This just describes Lisp (itself a materialization of the lambda calculus, which is your "Maxwell equations of computing")?!

sort of, in theory, but in most practical lisp/scheme implementations, certain values are opaque primitives. often functions are opaque. hashmaps, etc, are often primitives which don't have a "dependable formal representation". this means they cannot be e.g. serialized and coherently transmitted between processes.

Urbit solved this with nouns, which is arguably a substantial innovation. PLAN (in the author's view, which I find convincing) improves on this: https://git.sr.ht/~plan/plunder/tree/master/item/doc/PLAN.md

This looks really weird to me. I very much doubt this can be made into something practically useful.

Have you seen Unison[1]?

Unison seems like a much more interesting approach to making functions "serializable" and functional programming acquiring distributed capabilities almost transparently.

[1] https://www.unisonweb.org/

Hashed computations including functions distributed over something like DHT is a great concept with a lot of potential for a new form of computation.

It specifically refuted lambda calculus as both minimal and rigorous due to the stipulation of code as data vs data as code. Nouns also being more general than lists.

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