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Comment by MichaelAza | Hacker News Reader

I always think of TempleOS as well. Both project maintainers have created some impressive and/or interesting technology that is hindered by inflated self importance and being different for the sake of being different. Another common point - HN has a soft spot for both and upvotes most content related to these projects.

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It'd be interesting to hear a more detailed description of what you'd classify as "different for the sake of being different."

There's certainly plenty of code in this world that's the same for the sake of being the same. It's not terribly interesting to use CGA graphics for the sake of being different. On the other hand, I do wonder whether my children will grow up learning 1970s programming for the sake of being the same.

One example is that they flipped the meaning of 0 and 1 in their new language.

>We should note that in Nock and Hoon, 0 (pronounced “yes”) is true, and 1 (“no”) is false. Why? It’s fresh, it’s different, it’s new. And it’s annoying. And it keeps you on your toes. And it’s also just intuitively right.

This is exactly the way it's used in shell scripting, and honestly, it's more useful that way for us because it makes booleans default to true instead of false. If we're going to redo everything, we may as well do it right this time.

> This is exactly the way it's used in shell scripting

You say that like it’s a good thing.

I'll give you that one! It's an old mistake and not very costly in practice, but the intuitive rightness isn't worth the pain in the butt. But the pain in the butt also isn't painful enough to match the difficulty of fixing it.

I actually got this bad idea from Unix: !strcmp(), etc. It's certainly easier to overload error codes into a 0=true scheme, although Urbit doesn't actually do that.

"It's an old mistake and not very costly in practice, but the intuitive rightness isn't worth the pain in the butt."

Why is it intuitively right?

"a string can be slack in many ways, but taut in only one"

0 is true, everything else is false. At least that's my intuition.

Huh! Pretty similar to my comparison to Tolstoy's quote on happy and unhappy families.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10282933

Well, as I see it, the design of Hoon is definetly different for the sake of being different, syntax wise and considering the pronounciation guide. Using new terminology where existing terminology will suffice (off the to of my head, twig and span) is different for the sake of being different.

> being different for the sake of being different

Urbit has brilliant technical insight into perhaps the hardest problem our industry currently faces: why does everything always turn into a big ball of mud?

Urbit may turn out to be incredibly important. Parent comment is unjustified, uninformed, poor tone and ad hominem.

On the contrary, I'm quite interested and impressed by the technical quality of the project. I'm pointing out that throwing all first principles out of the window, even when its clearly unnecessary (renaming the ASCII characters) makes it harder to approach for no good reason.

Sorry, it looks like I read your comment uncharitably.

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