[axlprose]

> Is this better? Arguably, it's easier to learn. But I'm not sure I would regard it as better.

For what criteria of 'better'?

I can't really present an argument either way since I'm not familiar enough with the language, but it does seem like it requires a fairly high amount of cognitive overhead for... I'm not sure exactly. Keystrokes?

There is something to be said about the efficiency of glyph-based writing systems like kanji, so APL might've been on to something, but overloading common ascii characters and creating meaningless words? That seems like a lot of noise for brains without extraordinary working memory to filter out on a regular basis.

I'm sure thinking and writing in it are fine (even brainfuck isn't difficult to write), but for something intending to be the backbone of the internet, I would've assumed maintainability to have been the most important design goal.

[urbit]

Essentially, I'd say most peoples' brains are better at associative memory than they think they are.

When you see a digraph like -> or ?: in C, do you think "hyphen greater-than" or "question-colon"? Your brain long ago learned to treat these as individual symbols, not strings of two characters. And this despite not even having easy-to-say names for them. (In Hoon they are "hepgar" and "wutcol" respectively.)