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by 0x732202 1457 days ago
Can you imagine how unbearable object-oriented programming would be if we couldn't use the words "object", "scope", "function", "class", and so on? None of these terms actually reflect the bits in the silicon; they're abstractions over the bits for the sake of mental modeling. Urbit's language is necessary for exactly this reason; it's technical, not cultic.
1 comments
lisper 1457 days ago
No, that's not true. OO terminology is chosen to be informative and inclusive. It might not entirely succeed in this, but that is the goal.

Urbit's terminology, indeed its entire design, is chosen to be obfuscatory and exclusive. It is designed to conceal the fact that underlying the entire enterprise is an extreme right-wing ideology.

The mere existence of terms of art is not diagnostic of a cult. The design and motivation of those terms is.

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0x732202 1457 days ago
Do you have a source on that? If I go and ask for help in a Hoon channel, the devs there are more than happy to explain to me what all of the terms mean, using the documentation of those terms.
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lisper 1456 days ago
> Do you have a source on that?

Which "that"? OO or Urbit? For OO, no, I don't. It just seems obvious to me that OO terminology was not chosen to be deliberately obfuscatory. For Urbit, it's my opinion based on interactions with Curtis ten years ago. Many of those interactions were via email, so I could probably grovel through my archives and find what he said that led me to form those opinions. But again, it just seems obvious to me that Urbit's terminology is deliberately obfuscated.

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