Yesterday I wrote “Gas Town Decoded,” a brief guide to the insular language Steve Yegge uses to describe Gas Town. Gas Town, for those out of the loop, is Yegge’s attempt to build a system for AI agent orchestration.
Today, Steve Klabnik wrote “How to think about Gas Town,” which analyzes why Gas Town chose to use such strange language in the first place. It’s a great piece, and one with which I agree. You should read it!
In discussions around Gas Town, I and many others have noted the parallels to another infamous software system that used insular language: Urbit.
While it’s true that both Gas Town and Urbit invent their own language specific to their projects, they are otherwise extremely different. Urbit is fascist, Gas Town is not.
As Klabnik describes in his piece, Gas Town’s insular language is used by Yegge to signpost the experimental nature of the project and to discourage production use. Klabnik argues Yegge did this because, as someone who is programmer-famous, he knows anything he works on will be taken seriously by others.
Urbit, on the other hand, used insular language to create a sense of exclusivity and complexity, as part of Curtis Yarvin’s attempt to gain an audience for his fascist political ideas. Throughout the 2010’s, Yarvin leveraged Urbit to gain entry to programmer forums and conferences, where he could then spread his politics alongside his software.
So, while it’s true both Gas Town and Urbit use insular language, we shouldn’t consider them similar beyond that.
Copyright Andrew Lilley Brinker. Made with in California
