I'll admit, Hoon is weird. But complaining about Nock is like complaining about the JavaScript VM. You can JIT it and replace common functions to replace with calls to C functions instead. Nock defines the /results/, not how to get them. Jets are basically just because the Nock spec didn't want to have to outline a bunch of primitives that don't really matter, since they would be replaced with native calls anyways.

As for ideological views: there are 4 million planets. They are, essentially, houses, but each one of those planets can also issue 2^16 "moons", which can themselves be their own people. I don't know the reasoning behind why 2^32, but I'm also not going to ascribe the reasoning to human worth any more than I would the author of IPv4. There are also 2^64 comets, which are their own ships outside the trust heirarchy, which really just means that they have a default karma of 0 because they have no cost, and so can be Sybil attacked - not that they can never get a positive karma, or that you couldn't use one indefinitely instead of a planet (just that it's be unwieldy). Saying Urbit can't scale bigger than IPv4 is kinda like worry that Hoon can't be programmed in Chinese - there are probably bigger problems, and it could be solved by just doubling the amount of galaxies. Hell, Urbit is open source. There would be push back against doing it, but there is nothing stopping that from being patched in tomorrow.

The most common thing I've see n called fascist in Urbit is it's identity system, and this Urbit+Ethereum spec seems to be a direct solution to some of it. Now, even buying a star you don't have to trust the owner of the galaxy you bought it from, because it's a redeemable token.

> the most available first-class address in the system is in a 32 bit address space. Why? Not for efficiency, but because the authors believe there aren't and never will be 4 billion human beings on the planet worthy of having a first-class address in their system. This, by the way, is their actual response to the objection of an overlay network with 32 bit addressing.

One of the things they want is for identities to cost some nontrivial amount of money, about $10 or so. This mostly solves the spam problem because it's unlikely that spamming will get you $10 worth of value before you're blacklisted by your parent star and it refuses to route your packets.

Can you think of an identity count that would preserve moderate scarcity like this? Or would you have the address space be indefinitely mineable, kind of like bitcoin?

> You don't have to memorize the new names they've come up with for most of the ASCII punctuation characters, like "gal", "gar", and "hax" for "<", ">", and "#", "but it helps". A normal engineer's reaction to a system that tells it that it will help to remember a new name for the pound sign is to ask "Why? What fresh horror lurks in the deeper meaning of your new name for the percent sign? And why won't you tell me before I commit to this system?"

Odd, I saw the rationale early on, when I was just reading the documentation for Urbit. If you've ever seen Hoon code, you'll notice it has a lot of punctuation in it. Have a look at tumblr.hoon[0]. If you want to speak with fellow Hoon programmers in person and communicate fluidly, it's nice to have a compact, standardized-within-Urbit way of saying things like "$%"[1] out loud.

Now, at this point you're probably wondering "why would they have names that are all punctuation?". As far as I can tell, this keeps the identifiers short and of uniform length. From what I understand, one of the problems that they're trying to solve is that single-assignment code in, say, Lisp tends to flow down and to the right. They're trying to limit rightward visual creep, as I understand it.

Now, I'm not convinced that focusing on standard-library-identifier length is a good idea. Early C linkers could only handle function names that were six characters or shorter, and constraints like the ones in Hoon's standard library sound similarly arbitrary and likely to lead to unintuitive names like "strchr".

[0]: https://github.com/urbit/examples/blob/master/app/tumblr.hoo...

[1]: buccen, which I pronounce as "buck sen". It's used for making tagged unions, which reminds me of Erlang/Elixir {:ok, Value}/{:error, Reason} value-passing style.

> You don't have to memorize the new names they've come up with for most of the ASCII punctuation characters, like "gal", "gar", and "hax" for "<", ">", and "#", "but it helps". A normal engineer's reaction to a system that tells it that it will help to remember a new name for the pound sign is to ask "Why? What fresh horror lurks in the deeper meaning of your new name for the percent sign? And why won't you tell me before I commit to this system?"

Speaking of that.. I looked again at the reference documentation and the "hello world" (Fizzbuzz). It feels like I'm playing a game of Magic the Gathering on another world, with different physics and vocalizations I cannot do.

https://urbit.org/docs/hoon/reference/

     {$book p/(list {{aura @} moss})}: mold which recognizes a union tagged by head atom.
     {$lamb p/moss q/moss}: mold which normalizes to an example gate.
     {$port p/moss q/seed}: form an iron gate.
     {$gill p/moss q/seed}: form a gill, a wet one-armed core with sample.
     {$gasp p/seed q/seed}: form a gate with burnt sample.

Uhm.. What? I know I'm reading words. But part of it makes me feel like Im also in Game of Thrones. Iron Gate, wet one-armed core, and a burnt sample?

And their demo (Fizzbuzz) is just as illegible. https://urbit.org/docs/hoon/demo/ . I get programming. I know there's concepts in different langs that need understood. But one thing I know is that the demo should be easy to dip your toes in.

And it starts. "Tape" is really a string. "Home Desk" -Im guessing its the urbit home directory for your user? Urbit Pier? No bloody clue. But Im supposed to copy the file (oh wait, is file even used, or maybe its joobpflep?) to it. But at least the "Urbit Dojo" is the shell.

Also a decent portion of that address space is also reserved by an individual who doesn't believe that humans are equal. I think he just wants to be king of his own universe. The technology of Urbit is neat, but I find the politics abhorrent.