[tptacek]

I don't think the acerbic swipe at HN here was merited; as threads about programming environments go, this one seems pretty high-signal, with less flamage than any of the recent large threads about Go or Rust.

If your expectation about threads for Urbit is that they center on its real-world applications or potential, the project itself has done you no favors. It doesn't so much beg as howl madly for the kind of meta discussion that dominates this thread.

[ThrowAway123543]

That's a fair point, I was complaining about past Urbit threads, which sometimes spend a lot more time on the founder's weird-but-irrelevant politics than on the technical merits of the project. I expect and welcome flaming about why it's built the way it's built! I would so love a big deep thread between the urbit devs and some really smart people who have deep misgivings about its architecture, because the outcome of that would help me decide whether it's worth investing time learning hoon.

[tptacek]

You say his politics are irrelevant. I disagree: the only person in the world who probably has a complete picture of what this system is meant to be is Yarvin, and there are troubling indications that his political principles influence the design. See, for instance:

http://web.archive.org/web/20131014210123/http://www.urbit.o...

But that's neither here nor there, because this thread hasn't really centered on his odious politics, but rather on the dubiousness of its design and the steps the team has taken to conceal the basic details of the design behind a wall of obfuscation. We generally don't like distributed systems that go out of their way to make themselves harder to reason about.

I'd further add that a lot of basic support Urbit receives on places like HN seems premised on the idea that there's something intrinsically novel about it. But that's not so: overlay networks are a relatively well-trodden topic in CS, including overlays based on what we used to call "mobile code", including functional mobile code overlay networks.

I'd like to see more discussion of decentralized overlay networks, including compute overlays, on HN. I find it unfortunate that all those discussions for the past year or so have more or less been captured by this goofy system.

[ThrowAway123543]

shrug As you like. If whoever wrote Jira revealed that the reason "stories" and "bugs" and "epics" all have the same default fields was because he thinks capitalism is better than socialism or what have you, I would entirely ignore it, and I don't think I'd be any poorer for it.

I would also wish for more projects in this vein. If something came down the pike with similar aims but minus the spooky political baggage and the eccentric syntax, believe me, I'd subscribe to their newsletter. But AFAIK there is nothing in the offing even remotely similar to urbit other than urbit.

[tptacek]

That's because Jira is just a bug tracker. None of us need any assistance understanding the implications of a bug tracker, even one as sprawling as Jira.