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Re:Plunder and Urbit by sol_plunder on Wednesday August 09, 2023 @05:34AM (#37060413)
Main Plunder dev here, wasn't expecting to see this here.

This document was written by an Urbit dev, and the Urbit community is the target audience.

The conversation here seems to be mostly shitting on Urbit with the usual HN critiques.

However, Plunder is only tangentially related to Urbit.

It's the same paradigm, but totally different otherwise. Heavy Haskell influence.

The project is still mostly underground, but I'm happy to answer any questions.

Re:Plunder and Urbit by Nursie on Wednesday August 09, 2023 @07:08AM (#37060979)
I read your intro to PLAN. It's much easier to understand than anything I've read on this sort of topic before. I can at least come out of it understanding what the aims are and what it might provide.

It's interesting. Not something I think will affect my day to day life, but in a thought-experiment, LISP-y sort of way I can see why a certain kind of coder might find such a system intriguing. I imagine such a coder is probably into language design, lambda calculus, functional purity and formal verification rather than being on the 'just get things done' end of the spectrum.

I also don't think I can see such a design ever doing anything very quickly, as every operation is necessarily committed to disk. I guess that's where Jets come in...

It's amusing to contrast this with the general mood in programming where we strive to make programs ephemeral so that we don't care what's in memory, things die often and we just re-start them when we feel like it, allowing them to rebuild their internal state.

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Re:Plunder and Urbit by Nursie on Wednesday August 09, 2023 @10:18AM (#37063024)
I’m not seeing that simplicity or low-engineering overhead from reading about PLAN, personally, I’m seeing a computer scientist’s wet dream about composability and resilience, but not anything that would promote rapid development or reduced costs. In fact I think the opposite is true - this is such a reinvention that everything is likely to take subject matter experts and a lot of time.

P2P chat doesn’t seem like a very lofty goal at this point.

I’m sure there’s a lot more to your platform than PLAN, providing all sorts of facilities, but at that point you’ve kinda scuppered the “execute anywhere, forever” aspect of your model IMHO, because it relies on quite a complex VM to provide the simple coding environment.

Best of luck to you, but I’m still thinking “nerd trap” rather than “revolutionary tech”.

Re:Plunder and Urbit by jitl on Wednesday August 09, 2023 @07:55AM (#37061310)
Why is it called Plunder?
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Re:Plunder and Urbit by jitl on Wednesday August 09, 2023 @02:36PM (#37066781)
I think presenting Plunder as a "scheme lisp machine, with persisted application state" would be great for branding on HN :)
Re:Plunder and Urbit by sol_plunder on Wednesday August 09, 2023 @03:39PM (#37067446)
That sounds right! I'll keep that in mind.

"A lisp machine with fully automatic persistence. No database or filesystem needed" is actually a fairly accurate description.