Mostly I am just disappointed that very-smart people don't realize that such idiosyncratic decisions require a strong defense to get other people to believe in them. It doesn't seem reasonable to say "this is our serious plan to fix the internet, and also here's our ridiculous approach, sound good?".

If it's a serious plan with seriously dubious components, it needs a real defense. "Sometimes you need to build new languages from scratch" isn't a defense -- certainly not one that is proportional to the dubiousness of the plan.

https://developers.urbit.org/reference/hoon/overview has a lot of justifications that ... don't land. They're valid reasons to _consider_ doing what they've done, but on net, I just am not even slightly convinced that it's a tradeoff that is worth it. Especially the tradeoff of "not only should we make our own weird languages, we should make them totally obtuse to read and write, just for fun'. It is clearly not the tradeoffs a person trying to make a successful project that attracts developers would make.

I suppose I have an axe to grind with apologists for this because I think it's a shame they aren't putting their efforts into something with a better chance of succeeding, since I agree with their goal but not their plan for getting there.