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Comment by pcmonk | Hacker News Reader

Traditional punctuation names suck. "Ampersand", "at sign", "caret"? For a language like hoon where we use a lot of symbols, that gets really tiring. Having one-syllable names for glyphs is really convenient, and they tend to roll of the tongue. Everyone's free to use whatever names they want, of course, we just find these useful. Most people love these once they get used to them.

I don't think you can judge syntax by looking at it -- you have to use it for a little while. Hoon's syntax looks hard, but it's actually rather pleasant to use.

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This right here is what I mean when I suggest Urbit is unserious. "Green is just yellow and blue. Why do we call it 'green'? That name sucks. From now on, we're going to call it 'yellue'."

There's overreaching first-principles boil-the-ocean dorm room rethinking of concepts, and then there's renaming the ASCII characters.

You know someone's going to pop up and talk about the Russian names for blue, and how changing the word allows us to change the way we see things, right?

http://www.pnas.org/content/104/19/7780.full

A better analogy would be a modern day SSB [0] proposing a constitutional amendment to officially rename federal offices by their standardized acronyms, e.g. "President of the United States" to "POTUS", "Supreme Court of the United States" to "SCOTUS", etc., especially as this would be an equally superficial distraction from this hypothetical neo-SSB's real goal of replacing all Congressmen with AIs and relocating the capitol to Kansas City.

As it happens, "green" exists linguistically, so one is not compelled to wax artfully about the "yellow-blue blades [of grass] laced in dew". However, it used to be that the only way to talk of "orange" was as "yellow-red" or similar, until the simplifying convention of a new word for a distinct entity took hold.

Edit: Further, Urbit's equivalent of the Sunflower State Congress plan gloms enough together that an atomistically novel domain specific vocabulary is at least as useful.

Edit: As one effectively lay to the many disciplines of the professional field of computation, I use this forum to advertise my continued interest in a critical audit of Urbit. If Keean Schupke and Thomas Lord can probe the depths of Carl Hewitt's ActorScript [1] (the true standard for any so accused "obscurantist" software), then a fortiori Urbit's Anathem barrier [2] can be only semi-impermeable.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simplified_Spelling_Board

[1] http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/5243

[2] https://xkcd.com/483/

Well you should drop the OTUS, since it's redundant and implied. So you have the P, the SC (pronounced scee - with a long s), etc.

This definitely counts as a highbrow dismissal!

As I age, I find it harder and harder to remember how easy and natural it is for young people to learn new things: ideas, theories, languages, and yes -- names. Alas, we can't rejuvenate our brains. I know of only one (partial) cure: have your own kids. You'll feel jealous all the time, but it's worth it.

It's painful to admit that I'm probably too old to learn other peoples' new languages. But any new language isn't and can't be designed for 42-year-old silverbacks. It has to be designed for kids -- or at least, people are who are kids now. And believe me, teenagers love this kind of stuff...

[Edit: tptacek, when you edit a comment after posting it, I think it's good etiquette to mark it with an [edit]]?

FWIW: I wrote the first half of that comment, then 5 minutes later, feeling it was too snarky without explaining itself, added the sentence: "There's overreaching first-principles boil-the-ocean dorm room rethinking of concepts, and then there's renaming the ASCII characters."

I'm a parent of two teenagers, neither of whom seems particularly interested in new names for punctuation.

I understand. And it did improve the comment, so I forgive you. But it's just irritating when someone hangs a fat fastball over the plate, you whack it, then find out that the pitch magically turned into a curveball and all you've hit is a ground-ball single.

An XS Nock shirt is a dress for my daughter, but she loves the "code." I guess all kids are different. But you never know what they're ready to learn until you try to teach them.

I wonder if it's hard because we don't try enough, because reality and pragmatism bolt us to dry reuse rather wheel reinvention.

Even more digressing, I'm very curious if young brains have an innate sense of 'new' in the most complex and abstract sense. It's as if they smell it.

As for having kids, I have to say this: it's a wonderful experience, but it definitely doesn't make you smarter! Maybe that's the sleep deprivation talking though...

Also, the three-letter variable names aren't part of Hoon -- they're just a convention that works well if (and only if) you have short, simple functions.

I've actually taken to using TLVs with a Hungarian suffix in C -- it works well if (and only if) you have short, simple functions.

One way to think about variable names: declaring a variable is a way of saying "I couldn't quite get this into point-free form." Names should be the exception, not the rule. Again, this is much more true in a functional language.

> For a language like hoon where we use a lot of symbols

Languages with lots of symbols tend to be incredibly difficult to read at first. If you have a programming language where a typical program looks like line noise, it means the programming language is going to likely have a very steep learning curve (because a lot of those operators are probably not going to have their standardized meaning).

Think about Python. A well-written Python program is similar to the pseudocode you would write on a napkin. For a concrete example, look at the whitepaper's definition of I1 in pseudo-code. The "pseudo-Hoon" implementation of I1 looks totally different from the pseudocode, and to even begin to read the Hoon code, I would have to look up the meanings of approximately 10 different operators.

I guess there are two different camps of language design -- the Perl / Ruby / shell camp where having lots of non-standard operators in your syntax is desirable, and the C / Python / Lua camp which prefers a small set of operators with meanings close to their "standard" mathematical ones.

Well, C has ++, which is different from +, and it has &&, which is different from &. It also has ?:, and >> and <<, and * for pointers as well as multiplication, and // to mean something incredibly different from /, and...

To me, C syntax is obvious, because I've been using it for 30 years. It may be a small set of operators, but "meanings close to their standard mathematical ones" may be a bit of a stretch.

Yeah, I balked at C's inclusion as well. And that's just the signs. The way those signs are combined and the rest of the syntax are also often pretty gross. Try allocating an array of function pointers on the heap and you'll see what I mean.

And then there's Haskell, with it seems to be customary to define new operators extremely often; so much so than I can't cope with the speed trying to invent and memorize how to read them subvocally, unfortunately.

This is one thing we don't do in Hoon -- there are no user-defined macros, operator overloading, etc.

If you're going to put a lot of energy into binding syntax to sound to semantics, you only want to do it once (per language, at least.)

> Traditional punctuation names suck. "Ampersand", "at sign", "caret"?

Hence why geeks and programmers rarely call them by name. See http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/A/ASCII.html .

There's a lot of folk workarounds for this problem. They're mostly fine for languages that use ASCII lightly. But it'd be a pretty confusing mess if we applied the "pick something in the jargon file" approach to something like the Hoon syntax.

Everyone who's learned our ASCII dictionary, which admittedly is not a whole lot of people, applies it compulsively.

Is the list in the whitepaper correct? It shows in part:

  nap [
  pan ]
  lep (
  pel }

If that's not a typo, using mirrored words for ( and } is downright malicious.

Doh! That serves me right for tweaking these right before shipping the whitepaper. Yes, "pel" is ).

but isn't pel a rip ?

Clearly we should be using Victor Borge's phonetic punctuation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6bpIbdZhrzA

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