| Your question about the lookup service is an excellent one. One: it costs 20 bucks a year to run urbit.org in its capacity as a DNS server for binding 256 names to IPs. Two: at present, there are about 50 galaxy holders, so if between them they can't scrape up 20 bucks a year to keep urbit.org registered, Urbit has worse problems than centralization. Three: the use of DNS as a root routing table is an implementation detail in the Unix process, completely isolated from Urbit. When Urbit wants to route a UDP packet to galaxy X, it routes to the reserved range X.1.0.0. If the DNS itself collapsed, we could probably find other ways of mapping this table. I would not call bash/Perl/PHP "esoteric" either -- it has a very specific meaning: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esoteric_programming_language Hoon is a little under-documented and should have its grammar specified somewhere, although the easiest way to do so would be just to clean up the Hoon parser (a parser combinator written in Hoon). (The original plan was for the Hoon parser to look as pretty as a spec grammar, which many parsers in Hoon do. But looking at ++vast in hoon.hoon, you'll see we fall a little short of that goal.) |