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Comment by ardy42 | Hacker News Reader

> ..care to explain?

The developer of Urbit is better known as an advocate for "neo-ractionary" ideas, which I believe includes things that look like neo-feudalism:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curtis_Yarvin

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Enlightenment

IIRC, some of these political ideas are reflected in the design choices of Urbit.

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Yarvin has crank tendencies that show up in Urbit, but the ones that do show up have less to do with his politics and more to do with his penchant for obscurantism. He wants to be seen as a thought leader, in politics, computing, and elsewhere, but both the ideas in Urbit and his political ideas are either relatively straightforward to someone learned in the art, or highly objectionable. So they are wrapped in matryoshka-doll nestings of obscure notation with the promise "Just accept it for now, it'll all make sense in the end."

Was just perusing the Hoon tutorial out of curiosity, and it's wild how alien of a language it is. To my eyes it's like a bastard child of brainfuck and common lisp; look at the "simple Hoon program" they give in section 1.1 as your first introduction to Hoon code https://urbit.org/docs/tutorials/hoon/list-of-numbers/

Also, the interpreter won't parse integer literals without thousands separators (which are periods). JackieChanMindBlown.png

That doc and the language itself reads like a parody of obscure functional programming languages with obtuse syntax and semantics.

Keywords are RUNES and RUNES have CHILDREN, CHILDREN can be RUNES and the programs chains the RUNES until there are no CHILDREN. Functions are GATES and tuples are CELLS and you run programs as GENERATORS from your SHIP's DOJO.

It 'clicked' for me once I got to the example using the ?: rune since I'm already familiar with that as the shorthand ternary operator in various languages, and 'Generator' doesn't sound strange at all to any Python programmer.

That language is just brainfuck that takes itself too seriously.

It's like he's... being frustratingly, abstrusely different for the sake of being different.

The restricted address space of which the founder reserves a non-trivial amount has to do more with politics than obscurantism.

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