What does Urbit do?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6491678

by zindlerb • 13 years ago

2 2 13 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

I have seen several high ranking posts related to Urbit. I have spent some time on the site, but I cannot figure out the purpose of Urbit. What problem does it help solve? What does it do?

zindlerb• 13 years ago

Here is the link www.urbit.org

Q4273j3b• 13 years ago

Someone posted this link to an explanation a few hours ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6492366 It looks like that blogger will be writing more on Urbit soon. At the very least the comments on that blog post are informative & opinionated: look for the one by "StephenH".

Basically, Urbit's thesis is that "the internet is broken"---that it's a square peg document delivery system hammered viciously into a round distributed applications hole---and that UNIX is overpowered / for sysadmins. Urbit's goal is to replace your C-based OS and your HTML-based web with a unified, typed functional, VM-ish "thing". (Source: what I remember from the presentation video.)

To summarize: fix broken web, fix broken OS, create the developer's idea of a decent functional language. I think he knows he's being quixotic, but his morale is good and he's having a nice time of it.

Anybody at all please go ahead and correct me if I got anything wrong---I'm absolutely not an expert on any of this.

What does Urbit do?

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