Apparent usability isn't the same as actual usability. Pretty much everyone who learns Hoon is surprised by how easy it was, which may be a good thing or a bad thing depending.

There are about a hundred runes (digraphs) in Hoon, but you mostly see only 10 or 15. Also, they're organized by internal structure (all | runes do the same kind of thing), and most runes are macros which resolve to about 20 built-in forms. It's a couple of orders of magnitude easier than learning Chinese, which again may be a good thing or a bad thing.

Variable names designed to be memorable rather than meaningful are pretty normal in both math and functional programming. Math uses Greek letters for the same purpose, for instance. Also, as we note explicitly, this is a style that's optimal for simple code - in any language, you'd probably write add(a, b), not add(left_argument, right_argument).

Actually, Perl originally won because it was easy to get things done. It's had problems since, but for different reasons...