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This reasoning is great and makes perfect sense. The thing that makes it look like performance art is where Urbit appears to replace that complexity with something incredibly obscure that does not look like it will do anything helpful.

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I think this is just borne out of the stark and daunting difference between the way Urbit works and everything else we're familiar with.

I'm daunted by it, but I'm intrigued by it. I'm also pretty convinced that if I devote some time to it, it will make sense. And as a bonus I'll probably understand the rest of my computing a little better as well. Which is why I'm cloning the repo right now to have a play.

PS. Big repo. 400mb and counting.

Just because a system is unfamiliar does not mean that it hides some new insights, though the reverse is often true. Urbit's problems are much bigger than that- it is full of redundancies and poor choices of abstractions, like using "jets" to optimize away peano numbers.

Ugh! So sorry about the repo size. We can archive some old binaries to get that down.

If the big files are in git history then I think the only way to remove them is to do a full git filter-branch.

https://git-scm.com/docs/git-filter-branch

But this will sever history with all cloned copies, much like rebasing master would.

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