Interesting take: technical obscurantism as a kind of "captcha."
I'm jumping through the hoops of "Debianizing" something now, and I have to say the Debian project uses similar techniques to limit participation to the committed. The Debian packaging guidelines are very arcane and the docs are kind of scattered and the whole "experience" seems (probably unintentionally) built to keep casual "spam" out of the repo. Not necessarily a bad thing.
Oh, I misunderstood. Urbit just seems hard because it's weird. Having watched people learn the system, there are real advantages. Honestly writing documentation is just hard and we need to do a better job of it. We don't want to keep anyone out.
I'm jumping through the hoops of "Debianizing" something now, and I have to say the Debian project uses similar techniques to limit participation to the committed. The Debian packaging guidelines are very arcane and the docs are kind of scattered and the whole "experience" seems (probably unintentionally) built to keep casual "spam" out of the repo. Not necessarily a bad thing.