Urbit

Posted on by Chris Warburton

I find Urbit very confusing. It uses a bespoke virtual machine for a bespoke programming language, uses a bespoke approach to optimisation, uses another bespoke programming language which compiles down to the first, has a bespoke OS written in that second language, connects these OSes into a bespoke p2p network, all in order to…. what?

Their go-to example seems to be social networking with an interface to Twitter??

I absolutely get the ‘own your data/compute’ idea.

I think a bespoke OS is a decent approach, as it removes a lot of legacy complexity and allows a few carefully-chosen, simple, unified approaches to things like I/O and addressing.

I like the use of a functional language, as it’s an extreme form of isolation/sandboxing/reproducibility which makes sense in an untrusted online world. I don’t see why a new language was invented though, when something like a subset of Scheme, Joy, plain lambda calculus, etc. would suffice.

I have absolutely no idea why they’ve invented a custom p2p network/addressing system. I chalk this up to hubris, along with their spiel about ASCII punctuation, etc.

I have absolutely no idea how this has anything to do with social media. I assume it’s just for buzzword value. I don’t use social media, but I imagine programming language theory isn’t its main appeal?

Even if we assume that all of Urbit’s ideas pan out: interacting with Twitter seems to completely undermine all of it!

I get that the Twitter example seems to be along the lines of a minimum viable product, but it seems like a bad choice considering that it can’t really make use of any of Urbit’s features. It could be implemented as a big string of Javascript, with Urbit only being used to get it into the browser; the result would be about as integrated as any other approach.

A more relevant example might be a multiplayer game with a shared leaderboard, player chat and non-critical use of external APIs (e.g. gravatar for player pics), e.g. a clone of Words With Friends or maybe something with more animation.

The game itself would be a decent test of the programming languages, rather than just shuttling strings in/out of Twitter. The interactivity and chat would test the latency. The leaderboard would test shared access to data. Using external APIs would test the data-shuttling, in a way that doesn’t much affect the application if the provider shuts down the API.