Subjective data on crashing my fakeship and walking away.

learning-hoon.md

This was first posted on ~2022.3.16 in a group that no longer exists, based on the first few weeks of my experience in the first Hoon School Live cohort. Reuploaded here for posterity, which means some points are out of date.

Not less because in purple I descended
The western day through what you called
The loneliest air, not less was I myself.

What was the ointment sprinkled on my beard?
What were the hymns that buzzed beside my ears?
What was the sea whose tide swept through me there?

Out of my mind the golden ointment rained,
And my ears made the blowing hymns they heard.
I was myself the compass of that sea:

I was the world in which I walked, and what I saw
Or heard or felt came not but from myself;
And there I found myself more truly and more strange.

Tea at the Palaz of Hoon, Wallace Stevens

Hoon activities (or hooning) can include speeding, burnouts, doughnuts, or screeching tyres. Those commonly identified as being involved in hooning are young and predominantly male drivers in the age range of 17 to 25 years.

Hoon control laws are beginning to be extended to dangerous hoon behaviour using boats and other vessels, particularly jet skis.

Hoon , Wikipedia

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• “Pythonic”, “Lisp-y”, “Hoonish”.
• If you’re reading this you should probably learn some Hoon, for the same reason you should learn how to tune up your bike or sew a button.
• It’s fine!
  • I’ve found learning beginner-level Hoon not much harder than beginner-level Python. That it uses ‘runes’ rather than American English keywords to represent its logical structures does not, ime, make it harder to learn.
  • Hoon is actually quite simple. By which I do not mean it is easy. Non-programmers like me would do well to learn the difference , which taps into some of the reasoning behind Urbit’s existence in the first place.
  • I think the biggest obstacle to learning Hoon, as of ~2022.3.16, is that you can’t just get an answer to anything from Stack Overflow in 30 seconds. Maybe that’s a bug, maybe that’s a feature.
• Flashcards are pretty good for memory formation; fingers are better.
  • Hoon runes follow something like Zipf’s Law and you’re going to see |= a lot more than you’ll ever see !?.
  • If you’re going to memorise anything with flashcards, it should be the pronunciations and the rune families . If you know what anything beginning with “=“ does, you can sort of guess what =. is doing in context, even if you’ve forgotten what it would say on the other side of the card.
• Hoon is merciless in the wild and you are just going to eat dirt again and again and again until you get any given move right every time.
  • You should try to keep troubleshooting to as small a surface area as possible.
  • So: assume every line is wrong until you have proven otherwise in the dojo.
  • The biggest speed-boost I’ve yet had was learning to practice and practice in the dojo.
  • You should also get comfortable rooting around through the standard library in hoon.hoon. You can find an accompanying guide to that in the docs .
• You’re probably not going to write anything remotely useful until you can combine concepts and do it right every time.
  • But “real” exercises are more useful than abstract example code, so go looking for some. I’ve found Brian P. Hogan’s Exercises for Programmers quite useful. YMMV.
• If you want to learn how to write Hoon you shouldn’t start with the urbit.org docs . Those are useful once you kind-of-know what you’re doing.
  • Hooniversity.org is a good, fast, practical introduction to Hoon that will get you writing a lot. You can probably do it all in a few evenings. (Edit ~2023.07.22: no longer exists.)
  • The Hoon School Live lessons are a detailed walk through “critical-path Hoon” , starting with basic syntax and ending with Gall agents . These are intended for a cohort following along with homework, but the recorded lessons are useful on their own.