> Personally, I can't get over the really made up words.
The idea of having new names for everything is that when you use a name you've already seen before in another context, you carry forward any ideas you have about things with that name based on their implementations in those other languages.
There's a specific meaning for the words that are used for the introductory language concepts: arm, gate, battery, sample, core, rune, glyph, ... twig, jet, and so on.
Many of these are either new concepts, or new arrangements of old concepts. A gate is not a lambda or a function, neither is a core, and if either were called those things anyone who hadn't seen them explained before would probably go ahead and take the big word to their nearest search engine, only to become even more confused by idiosyncratic and sometimes conflicting explanations of those ideas that appear slightly differently in hundreds of other languages.
I think that Hoon hopes to be the first programming language for a lot of people one day, so they won't usually be coming expecting familiar things to have familiar names.
Interestingly, this same objection comes up when people try to read so-called (normally French) postructuralist theory from the 60s and 70s. Derrida himself, or Rorty writing on Derrida, supposedly advanced a similar argument, that using new terms allowed one to avoid falling back onto old concepts.
The idea of having new names for everything is that when you use a name you've already seen before in another context, you carry forward any ideas you have about things with that name based on their implementations in those other languages.
There's a specific meaning for the words that are used for the introductory language concepts: arm, gate, battery, sample, core, rune, glyph, ... twig, jet, and so on.
Many of these are either new concepts, or new arrangements of old concepts. A gate is not a lambda or a function, neither is a core, and if either were called those things anyone who hadn't seen them explained before would probably go ahead and take the big word to their nearest search engine, only to become even more confused by idiosyncratic and sometimes conflicting explanations of those ideas that appear slightly differently in hundreds of other languages.
I think that Hoon hopes to be the first programming language for a lot of people one day, so they won't usually be coming expecting familiar things to have familiar names.