I disagree. I haven't touched urbit in a long time but learning the language (hoon) and trying to do something with it was a delightful experience. After learning some number of programming languages it's hard to find something new, where you feel like you are exploring something. Most of them are just a simple mapping of concepts that you already know (yes, ultimately it's a mapping too but it seems to have more layers).
I don't know what secret of the universe do you expect to find there. If it would be highly practical technology or pareto optimal to anything else that's popular, it wouldn't be obscure.
If you did a deep dive and regret spending time, for things like these I suggest not going deep if you are not enjoying the dive. Life's too short for things you don't enjoy when you have your basic needs covered.
Also, while I enjoyed talking with Curtis I think it's important to be able to separate great things that people create from those people themselves. You don't want to throw out most of physics, math and computer science.
> After learning some number of programming languages it's hard to find something new, where you feel like you are exploring something.
Like the Cenobites of Hellraiser who after running out of territories of pleasure to explore are forced to venture into pain just to find new experience.
Why Hoon rather than Brainfuck? Or Cobol? Or APL? Or Dylan? The world is chock-full of obscure programming languages. The only difference I see is that Urbit is wrapped in this air of intrigue and mystery which IMHO is wholly undeserved. But if you like that sort of thing and are going into it with your eyes open, by all means, be my guest. Just don't try to represent it as something that it's not.
But if you just want to explore the programming language design space I think you're much better off designing your own language than trying to wrap your brain around Nock and Hoon. And even before you do that, there's Haskell and Rust and Webasm and Clojure and Prolog, which I think give you a lot more bang for the learning curve buck.
Can you stop criticising people's intelligence when replying to them? You've done that a couple of times in these comments (hypothetically or not). "If you can't understand/don't agree, maybe you're just stupid" is rude and a bad look.
I don't know what secret of the universe do you expect to find there. If it would be highly practical technology or pareto optimal to anything else that's popular, it wouldn't be obscure.
If you did a deep dive and regret spending time, for things like these I suggest not going deep if you are not enjoying the dive. Life's too short for things you don't enjoy when you have your basic needs covered.
Also, while I enjoyed talking with Curtis I think it's important to be able to separate great things that people create from those people themselves. You don't want to throw out most of physics, math and computer science.