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Moron Lab: Urbit: functional programming from scratch

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Moving to a more practical subject, may I suggest Google Wave as the starter to Urbit. It is a distributed document update system which seems like it can be worked into a distributed document storage system. Google Wave is an extremely fine piece of technology, though I'm not yet clear on its social uses. Also, the operation-rewriting distributed-editing algorithm it uses (I forget the exact terminology), is an excellent example of a difficult protocol to implement. A lot of work seems to have gone into both this and the UI. However, I would not call GW "distributed," because it has no decentralized or mobile state - at least, that is externally visible. Your Google Wave wave is sitting on a (logical) server somewhere, collecting everyone's wavy little dribbles of thought as generated by their browsers - precisely like any other Web app. I think GW is best compared to a simpler piece of technology - the revision-control server. This is also in the Urbit ballpark, perhaps closer. A s

Moron Lab: Urbit: functional programming from scratch Moron Lab martian programming Wednesday, January 13, 2010 Urbit: functional programming from scratch Urbit is a static functional namespace : a programming environment specified as a single stateless, frozen function. The Urbit function is Maxwellian : formally defined by a small system of axioms. Urbit, while a cool toy, is designed for practical computing. If this sounds like it needs some explaining, it does. But first, since Moron Lab is just a blog and not a recipient of Federal funding, I can start with a vaporware disclaimer . Urbit,

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