Re:What Urbit is
by dustingetz on Thursday June 02, 2016 @07:48AM
(#11821746)
Forgive my ignorance, but a typed functional system all the way down to machine is a huge departure from today's languages built on top of imperative dynamic machines, and a huge advantage in building typed functional systems, isn't it? I would go so far as to say that without a new machine and new languages designed for it, the abstraction will always leak. Which is why our software sucks today.
[ Parent
| on HN ]
That's true, but Urbit isn't like that. It runs on stock hardware, which is to say, untyped imperative hardware. And even from a purely theoretical point of view, Urbit's lowest level (Nock) is untyped.
The last time anyone built a computer that was typed all the way down to the hardware was (ironically) Lisp machines.