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by MFLoon 2256 days ago
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

1 comments

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