1.3 KiB
nock
nock is our machine code.
nock is a homoiconic combinator algebra, not much fancier than SKI combinators. The spec fits on a T-shirt and gzips to 340 bytes.
Think of nock as a kind of functional assembly language. It's not like assembly language in that it's directly executed by the hardware. It is like assembly language in that:
- Everything in Urbit executes as nock.
- You wouldn't want to program directly in nock.
- Learning to program directly in nock is a great way to start understanding urbit from the ground up.
Just as Unix runs C programs by compiling them to assembler, Urbit runs Hoon programs by compiling them to nock. You could try to learn Hoon without learning nock. But just as C is a thin wrapper over the physical CPU, Hoon is a thin wrapper over the nock virtual machine. It's a tall stack made of thin layers, which is much easier to learn a layer at a time.
And unlike most fundamental theories of computing, there's really nothing smart or interesting about nock. Of course, in a strictly formal sense, all of computing is math. But that doesn't mean it needs to feel like math. nock is a simple mechanical device and it's meant to feel that way.