63/ ...and once I realized JUST HOW SIMPLE IT IS, I got very very angry. I hadn't been banging my head on understanding some deep mystery of the universe which is intrinsically hard - I had been banging my head on malevolent documentation designed to keep people out.
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74/ I have heard two insiders - neither of them Curtis - say that high walls are good because they keep out normies. Curtis, in fairness, wants everyone to use Urbit / Hoon. ...and that's cool! Proper evangelical spirit !
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75/ And, again, my frustration w Hoon is not evidence that I think it's boring or bad or that I don't care - it's that I think it's good and interesting, but the community / company have unnecessary and bad self-sabotaging habits.
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76/ There is a third option: explaining concepts in a method other than cyclical definitions, keeping concept explanations and implementation details distinct, avoiding self indulgent side rants, using English keywords...https://twitter.com/pcmonk/status/1502354415079989250 …
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77/ Curtis is like the Confederacy: he can achieve secession, and all he has to do is keep his nature in check. ...but the Scots Irish needed a glorious attack on Fort Sumter, and Curtis needed to write docs like a slam poet.
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78/ YES!!!!!!! EXACTLY THIS!!!!!!!! Hoon is very very similar to lisp, just with absolutely terrible keywords, an absolutely terrible formatting (two distinct format types, actually!), absolutely terrible variable norms (two, actually!).https://twitter.com/kingdweeb_/status/1502354895147454467 …
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79/ so, here are some parts of Urbit that I think are good or at least interesting: * the virtual machine * the address system (galaxies, stars, etc.) * the cryptographic network between them
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80/ The terrible parts are all in Hoon: * runes * 'tall' and 'wide' code formatting * 'lapidary' (1 letter) var and 'normal' (4 letter) var names * malicious / incompetent documentation
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81/ What I'd like to see is * a decent language (lisp like, if you like prefix operators and parents, or Ruby like, if you like chaining postfix operators) written in Hoon, and then Hoon sealed off and abandoned forever and ever * decent docs
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82/ * a lack of official position on formatting code. Let a thousand flowers bloom. * a lack of official position on naming variables. * a lack of official position on what pedagogical techniques are best. Let the market decide!
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83/ One problem with geniuses is that they have opinions on EVERYTHING. A second problem is that that they can't distinguish "this is actually better than all that came before" from "actually I just have a PERSONAL preference for X over Y". Curtis trying to mandate style >
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84/ and variable names, and blah blah blah blah is an example of him elevating preference to dogma. (and enforcing some of them via the parsing of lines in the interpreter / console) The good thing about lack of standards (i.e. freedom) is people can make themselves at home.
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85/ You might be the world's best structural engineer / architect, and come up w a way that's 100x better to build homes ... but maybe consider that letting people pick their own paint and carpets instead of dictating the "best" choices might increase adoption ?
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87/ yeah, I'm happy it's having some success! I just think that it will explode in popularity once someone writes the-very-last-ever-program-in-Hoon, which is the interpreter for some better languagehttps://twitter.com/mr_archenemy/status/1502360815009157121 …
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88/ yeah, absolutely! I'm not saying "Urbit is doomed". I wish it success, and I think it has a decent chance of success. I'm talking about what I see as a necessary (and perhaps inevitable?) step in its evolution / climb.https://twitter.com/mr_archenemy/status/1502361942253572097 …
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89/ Folks inside the cult push back on absolutely every complaint from people banging on the doors saying "we're enthusiastic...we just can't understand the docs" by saying "they're casuals; the docs are great; if they WANTED to learn, they would"https://twitter.com/dendricide/status/1502363026414096390 …
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90/ yes! ...but that's a roundabout way of saying "...because of Curtis' sense of aesthetics"https://twitter.com/samuhyu/status/1502363384628477953 …
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91/ on a side note, I will never stop laughing that "arch conservative" cyg is actually, temperamentally, a Year Zero Maoist who doesn't want to preserve cultural norms w slow evolution, but instead wipe EVERYTHING clean like Le Corbusier's Killdozerhttps://twitter.com/mr_archenemy/status/1502363492011098113 …
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94/
@0x49fa98 asks, and he receives https://tjic.com/archive/1_trees.txt … https://tjic.com/archive/2_subject.txt … https://tjic.com/archive/3_fp.txt … https://tjic.com/archive/4_trees.txt … https://tjic.com/archive/5_dojo.txt … https://tjic.com/archive/6_theory.txt … https://tjic.com/archive/7_clone_and_modify.txt … https://tjic.com/archive/8_clone_and_modify_more.txt … https://tjic.com/archive/8_cores.txt …Show this thread -
95/ The above are the first 9 chapters of what was going to be an "Intro to Hoon" book, because I got strong pushback that "no, this is the wrong way to explain things, we don't support this". ...at which point I shut down my urbit planet and walked away, dismayed / disgusted.
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97/ men want just one thing, and it's !@#-ing disgusting [ documentation that actually explains things ]pic.twitter.com/0wuwqHbA6n
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100/ but tweet #100 is self referentialhttps://twitter.com/leepavelich/status/1502380533849858048 …
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101/
@pcmonk's disagreements w me are threaded ; if you want an overview of his stance, you can jump in here and scrollhttps://twitter.com/pcmonk/status/1502307438023757829 …Show this thread -
102/ me: "Tlon has made a lot of decisions that make it very hard for interested newbs to understand WTF they're talking about" a Tlom emploee / Urbit defender: "yes...that's because WE DON'T THINK ABOUT YOU AT ALL" [ literal quote ]https://twitter.com/pcmonk/status/1502347522794147840 …
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103/ Exactly Tlon is content with some fraction of people [ 5% ? 0.5% ? ] who want to learn Hoon being able to succeed bc of selection bias: they poll among those who succeed. They freely admit (see prev tweet) that they don't think about newbs at all.https://twitter.com/ThatDubiousCat/status/1502390438866554883 …
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attempt
if true (and they are) go pretty far towards proving "it doesn't need to be this hard; Tlon's approach was incompetent and/or malicious".