I often disagreed with Curtis about this stuff and fought it hard. Ultimately I was wrong about maybe 80% of it. I somewhat suspect the basic problem is you don't believe the premise that earth software is bad, and the way it's written leads to explosions of complexity.
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Philip Monk Retweeted ⓘ Dogs don't have thumbs
A problem with people in general is they assume that everyone is always talking to them in their current state, and to the degree that it's hard to understand, it's either incompetent or malicious.https://twitter.com/MorlockP/status/1502316829133479938 …
Philip Monk added,
ⓘ Dogs don't have thumbs @MorlockP38/ (b) Obscure naming. The team (i.e. Curtis) was in love w 4 letter words (Tlon, Hook, Nock) and extended this to EVERYTHING. Which led to active anti-intuitive names like "gate", "wing", "door". Also, team (Curtis) rejected 90% correct analogies. >>>Show this thread1 reply 0 retweets 5 likesShow this thread -
In reality, names are used much more often by people who've learned the name than by people who haven't. So: for people who've learned the name, what's important? Well, it depends what you want to do. For Urbit, we want to build things as far away from earth software as possible
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If you use names from earth, then it will be impossible to inhabit a really distinct mental space. Minds snap to grids really aggressively, so if you want to avoid snapping to existing concepts, you need distinct names, and more generally a distinct aesthetic.
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Many (usually young) people travel to another country, live a totally different lifestyle, and love it. They decide they're going to live that way when they get back, but immediately they fall into their old habits. It's extremely hard to live a new life in your old environment.
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As an example, we've commonly called Clay a "filesystem", and that has held back its development by years. The same is true in many of the other places we've used earth names.
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There's a sense in which this principle is "intentionally discomforting", but not to "the mundanes". It's just not a decision made for how it affects the learning process. "I don't think about you at all", etc
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Philip Monk Retweeted ⓘ Dogs don't have thumbs
How many became good hoon programmers? Not exactly fair because anything like this has a power law. But I have an n in the hundreds, and I've spent countless hours explaining why that shortcut they took is exactly why they can't get their code to work.https://twitter.com/MorlockP/status/1502348077075767298 …
Philip Monk added,
ⓘ Dogs don't have thumbs @MorlockP68/ Phillip, the fact that I have data of something like n=15, where I explained Hoon core concepts in simple English and people GOT IT, IMMEDIATELY whereas they had tried and failed using Curtis / Tlon docs, is evidence that I'm right. >>> https://twitter.com/pcmonk/status/1502347516724973570 …Show this thread1 reply 0 retweets 9 likesShow this thread -
Those analogies are fine to solve project euler problems, and I don't think they're bad as training wheels, but nobody gets to be a good hoon programmer without understanding that core is not just a library in an opaque "environment".
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By the way, I love your writing style and would love there to be docs written in that style because there's an element of "anything to get you started" that's very real. I just don't think it's either the only or best way to teach hoon.
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