Now lie in it: an uxntal retrospective | Hacker News Reader

Now lie in it: an uxntal retrospective

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> I am not convinced that computers solve any real problems either.

This strikes me as such a strange thing to say that I think I must have misunderstood what they’re getting at.

This has strong Urbit vibes, somehow.

Dunno. IMHO, it feels a lot more practical than Urbit.

I can basically understand what it is. So to me, it's very different.

Urbit is an underrated project! It was definitely an inspiration for the language I’m working on:

[0] https://scrapscript.org

I probably want to talk to you about programming language ideas.

What are your thoughts on Unison[0], which also uses hash-addressed code and managed effects?

[0] https://www.unison-lang.org/

Sure, feel free to email me anytime :)

[1] hello@taylor.town

Unison seems cool! I met some Unison folks a few years back and our visions didn't have much overlap. Nice people, but their fundamental design decisions with hashes/effects/etc are incompatible with the web I'm trying to build.

I thought it was more https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CHIP-8

The Urbit nock machine is very different.

Last time someone said that on here, one of the responses was, "Uxn is to Urbit as science is to scientology."

It may not be quite true (Urbit isn't completely fake) but it's sure funny.

Interesting, I've never heard of Uxn before, I'll take a closer look, thank you.

something tells me they might not entirely appreciate that comparison haha

I'm not very familiar with either project, but they have similar names.

Uxn is interesting as an art project, but it's not really practical to use by anyone besides its own creator.

It's not something I'd want to actually use, but it seems like many others enjoy it.

As an art piece it's pretty impressive just because of how completely different their perspective on computing is, and how it blends with their ideas on life.

It reminds me a lot of FORTH culture.

I wouldn't go that far, as there are already a bunch of people using it. As always, there's a spectrum between mass consumption and purely individual environments. It's just that as an industry, we've never been that much oriented towards the "mass" end since personal computing started. You basically pick one of two or three IDEs, and as a prize get to customize your color scheme…

There's still a not-quite-niche amount of e.g. (neo-)vim or Emacs users who have highly customized environments, and often not just by composing various third party elements, but also writing a lot of extension and glue code.

And of course on the other end, you've got people who wrote their own editors and other daily apps, often encouraged by constraints - forth environments in embedded situations (Chuck Moore's ColorForth being a good example), or Windows without "POSIX escape hatches", where there's a lot of handwritten tools in C/C++. I'm a bit saddened about how little one knows of this, which brings us back to art: Just like we're never getting to see the unique paintings some Belgrad plumber is doing in their attic, we're also never getting to see the dozens of Rexx scripts that work for some IBM mainframe programmer for decades.

A lot of the "alternative" environments are less practical. But they are joyful to their users, which is a part of user experience (or, well, human experience) we shouldn't neglect. Performative minimalism is probably one of the bigger ones amongst the readers of this forum.

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