I'm not exactly unbiased to Urbit, but I found Hoon as usable as they say it is. It seems like everyone that hears about Hoon's rune syntax comments about how insane it is, but it really is easy to get into.
I'm partial to calling it "Chinese Lisp" - Hoon runes are converted directly into AST nodes, but instead of using friendly words it uses weird diagraphs. The fact that the runes are grouped into families makes it much simply, however. You don't have to know what "|*" does exactly, just know that all runes that start with bar (|) create the equivalent of functions, so it has to be related to that. Instead of memorizing 100+ runes that are all completely different from eachother, most of them are just variants of others and are even macros to other runes.
While it may look like garbage, programs such as a brainfuck vm[1] are easy to scan when you can get the gist of the program structure very easily.
While some of the names are quite a pain, a good portion of the stdlib's arms are teniously named related to their subject, or are very easily grouped with their function. snag is index, scag is prefix, slag is suffix.[2] The docs for the stdlib, along with examples of how to use it, are shipped with every planet at http://localhost:8080/home/tree/pub/doc/hoon/library, although the initial page generation takes a bit. I'm not that big of a fan of the CVC variable names, however.
I'm partial to calling it "Chinese Lisp" - Hoon runes are converted directly into AST nodes, but instead of using friendly words it uses weird diagraphs. The fact that the runes are grouped into families makes it much simply, however. You don't have to know what "|*" does exactly, just know that all runes that start with bar (|) create the equivalent of functions, so it has to be related to that. Instead of memorizing 100+ runes that are all completely different from eachother, most of them are just variants of others and are even macros to other runes.
While it may look like garbage, programs such as a brainfuck vm[1] are easy to scan when you can get the gist of the program structure very easily.
While some of the names are quite a pain, a good portion of the stdlib's arms are teniously named related to their subject, or are very easily grouped with their function. snag is index, scag is prefix, slag is suffix.[2] The docs for the stdlib, along with examples of how to use it, are shipped with every planet at http://localhost:8080/home/tree/pub/doc/hoon/library, although the initial page generation takes a bit. I'm not that big of a fan of the CVC variable names, however.
1: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/chc4/sample-apps/master/bf... 2: http://doznec.urbit.org/home/tree/pub/doc/hoon/library/2b#-s...