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You might want to check out Urbit: urbit.org. The whitepaper[1] is a bit outdated but in section 12 "Inadequate summary of related work" you can see some of its influences:

"Many historical OSes and interpreters have approached the SSI[2] ideal, but fail on persistence, determinism, or both. In the OS department, the classic single-level store is the IBM AS/400 [18]. NewtonOS [19] was a shipping product with language-level persistence. Many image oriented interpreters (e.g., Lisps [20] and Smalltalks) are also SSI-ish, but usually not transactional or deterministic. And of course, many databases are transactional and deterministic, but their lifecycle function is not a general-purpose interpreter."

- [1] https://media.urbit.org/whitepaper.pdf

- [2] "Solid-State Interpreter"


Urbit is mostly marketing fluff for extracting money from investors and potential users. It is based on a for-profit commodity and ecosystem (their stars and ships and planets and all that stuff) that you have to buy into to use it. You cannot just "run your own urbit".


Sadly, Urbit is forever tarred by one of its contributors. I'm not saying it's not worth investigating. It is. But why put your energies in a software project which already has a cultural strike against it? It's sort of like maintaining RieserFS: technically interesting but upsetting the social nature of programming humans.


Well. Rieser tried to keep his professional and criminal lives separate. RieserFS wasn't an expression of his revolutionary worldview.

And I was going to point out that Java survived Patrick McNaughton, FOSS survived ESR, etc.

From the whitepaper, Urbit looks bitchin. I love its audacity. In that way, reminds me of Linda (tuplespaces), Xanadu, Jef Raskin's Humane Interfaces (Canon Cat), and others.

Alas. It appears Urbit and its creator's worldview are inseparable.

I'll wait for the reboot. Or maybe just glean some of its ideas.

Thanks for the head's up.


> one of its contributors

I think "original creator and sole original developer" would be a more accurate summary.


> Last Updated: September 24, 2018

This is very outdated and Tlon no longer operates/runs urbit.org but, in any case, the ToS says this: "The Site is owned and operated by Tlon", so the reference was to the website "urbit.org", not the Urbit project.


Urbit has always been open source—currently under the MIT license [1]—and same as Ethereum it's also guided by a non-profit foundation, the Urbit Foundation [2] established in 2021.

[1] https://github.com/urbit/urbit/blob/develop/LICENSE.txt [2] https://urbit.org/overview/people-history




This article [1] has some good points about it.

- [1] https://medium.com/dcspark/why-urbit-410d32961031


> Could somebody help with an ELI5 please?

"Essentially it just uses Ethereum as an event log and all the computation happens inside your Urbit instead of on-chain." [1]

A more up to date version of the document shared in the google group can be found in this video [2]

- [1] https://groups.google.com/a/urbit.org/g/dev/c/p6rP_WsxLS0/m/...

- [2] https://youtu.be/CKuHXrdkIw0


I'm going to defer to pcmonk's comments since they are 100% correct. Thanks btw! :)

Also, nemo1618's app is both a very nice flashcard app and one of the best ways to learn and get started developing apps for Urbit.


Thanks! :)


Thanks! I'm happy that you liked it :)


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