Intro to Hoon Club


Hoon is devilishly hard to learn ... and yet, having 90% learned it, I
have this experience over and over and over of "holy crap, now that I
FINALLY GET IT, this wasn't hard at all.  Why did that concept take me
20 hours?"

Talking w other Hoon programmers, this is not abnormal...in fact, it IS the norm.

Hoon is hard to learn for a few reasons:

* weird syntax
* the weird syntax is made worse because there IS a regular syntax,
     but most of the docs use the advanced labor-saving irregular
     syntax...which makes it much much harder to build a conceptual model
* very very bad (actively malicious) documentation
* it's functional programming, which most of us are not used to
* weird type system
* weird data structure / model
* concepts do not line up neatly with concepts in other languages.
* refusal of documentation writers to use existing normal terms
* circular definitions
* documentation written for computer scientists, not working engineers
* documentation written as REFERENCE documentation / a standard, not as a tutorial
* large gaps on the rungs of the ladder

Explanations like the following are common:

"A wing is a path that selects a face of a hoon, but if the wing selects buc it fires the arm.  A hoon is just an AST."

Stare at this for an hour.  You will not learn ANYHTHING.  Now go an ask a typical hoon programmer for an explanation.

E.g. "What's an arm?"

Answer: "Oh, an arm is just a Hoon.  It's at axis 2 if it's buc."

Let's continue the dialogue.

Q: "What is axis 2?"

A: "It's the battery."

Q: "What's the battery?"

A: "It's where the arms live, at axis 2."

Q: "OK, fine, I'll just accept the 'axis 2' thing.  Is this always true?"

A: "Well, if it's a core.  And axis 2 is either where buc lives or where both the list of arms is anchored in the hoon".

It's !@#$-ed Martian.

...and not in a good way.

I am going to teach Hoon as best I can.  I will strive to NOT do the above.

The general structure:

* I will introduce a few topics, and give BRIEF overviews of them.
  Then I will circle back to each of these topics, going into more depth. 


XXX add a "motivations" section here!