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DougMerritt

There appears to be no "About" on that site. Who knows what on earth it is?

On the left sidebar, the "documentation" link is to a video. No thanks, I'm look for a sentence of text.

The next link down is a 404 error.

The community link is for insiders...lots of comments about people leaving the building,whatever that means.

Bottom of page, how to install. Why am I installing something when I don't know what it is?

Sites that expect you to already know what they are about, and do not deign to give so much as a sentence of explanation, are extraordinarily frustrating.

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Sorry our site sucks. We released accidentally and are more or less in "semi-stealth mode." You probably shouldn't be interested yet. Unless you like playing with semi-broken stuff. When it's not broken we'll let you know.

Urbit is indeed a purely functional OS, not super dissimilar to the OP's project. And it works at least well enough to run a chat server on its own network (which generated all those logs with "leaves the building"). But we ship no code before its time and we probably shouldn't even have a site up.

You'll enjoy the video though - it has good music, at least.

That's fine -- but please add an "About" link that says what "urbit" is.

That lack of explanation, that expectation of speaking to insiders, is unfortunately very common on web sites, not just yours.

Please add the About explanation even if you decide to take the site offline. At least that way, it will already be ready, later, when the project is further along.

I was just reading about the defunct House functional OS yesterday, coincidentally, so I'm interested in the general topic.

Thanks again for the advice.

Do you have a link to House? I wish people naming projects would realize that the Internet is dead and all we have is the Googlenet...

I totally agree, it's sad when interesting links die, and it's sad when a search term is extremely generic.

Here's what I've got, pasted out of my notes:

House has been successfully implemented in Haskell, I'd assume that Haskell would fit your criteria. Admittedly, House is an experimental OS, rather than production one. But they have managed to implement everything from kernel though network stack, to a rudimentary GUI. [link broken, see search results below] 2005 http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/943

House is a demo of software written in Haskell, running in a standalone environment. It is a system than can serve as a platform for exploring various ideas relating to low-level and system-level programming in a high-level functional language. More details are available in our ICFP 2005 paper: A Principled Approach to Operating System Construction in Haskell. http://ogi.altocumulus.org/~hallgren/ICFP2005/ http://programatica.cs.pdx.edu/House/

terse wikipedia article on House http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_(operating_system)

short LTU thread on functional systems programming http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/943

...oh, also there's a book, "Unix System Programming with Standard ML" by Anthony L. Shipman 2001

Was free online, link is broken, available via archive.org:

http://web.archive.org/web/20040531113417/web.access.net.au/... http://web.archive.org/web/20040531113417/web.access.net.au/...

I just found that, have not read it.

House is an OS in a very different sense than Urbit - the "boots on bare metal" sense. The core of House is a monad which represents the hardware state of a common Intel box.

Urbit is intended to run virtually in the cloud and is an OS only in the sense of "stores your data and runs arbitrary programs". As a cloud computer its "function" is simply (old state, packet in) -> (new state, packets out). For communicating with the host OS this generalizes to "event in" and "actions out." Eg, I got an HTTP connection so I send an HTTP response. So not only isn't it done, it isn't even very smart... but it is a function and it is an OS.

Your video is awesome :) It warped my mind a little bit (in particular the "let's execute some program written next week" part--or did I imagine that), and also made me dig into Borges' works again ;)

There's a long-winded description in the first blog post:

http://www.urbit.org/2013/09/24/urbit-intro.html

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