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Comment by newuser88273 | Hacker News Reader

A given Nock implementation is intimately coupled to a matched Hoon compiler.

Attempts to write anything just to T-shirt spec and run on a given Nock-based platform are almost certain to fail. The real spec you'd be required to write to is implied by the platform implementation. Marketing problem: That real spec is not very elegant and it doesn't zip down to a handful of bytes. It doesn't fit on a T-shirt. It's not a stable specification. It doesn't describe an open platform. Yet Urbit marketing copy wants me to believe all those things.

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If you s/is/could be/, I would agree. I would say s/is/should not be/. That is, it is possible to screw this up and create "intimacy" (high coupling), but obviously I recommend against it.

Put it this way: when it's properly done, the jets (specific optimizations) are coupled to your compiler and libraries about the way your display server is coupled to your graphics driver. As a programmer you can't, don't and shouldn't know what if any GPU is executing your GL. Or at least, if you do - mistakes have been made.

Added to this is the fact that it's possible to obtain at least decent performance just by using standard basic math, eg, decrement. Yes, you can roll your own decrement - but at this point you are just being perverse.

So T-shirt spec is like the written law of Urbit; strangers can read it, we can't help that. But of course there are the unwritten laws and rules of polite speech, here in Urbit just as everywhere else. There are special occasions (you just know!) where you must use exactly the right phrases (you just know!)

Ahh, but she slips, uses the wrong phrase. Now everybody knows: she's a pervert! Rolling her own decrement, the little... Quick, freeze her out of the conversation. She shall speak no more.

But look, isn't she hot? Really, it could be nice... but alas, there's just no way around Urbit gov's cryptographic chastity belt locks...

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