0x732202

... or we could just build more nuclear plants and harness practically free energy, without getting weird about who's having babies

Do you have a source on that? If I go and ask for help in a Hoon channel, the devs there are more than happy to explain to me what all of the terms mean, using the documentation of those terms.

The cost of being a member is literally on the tin. They tell you up front that identities are scarce and must be purchased.

As regards programming cost, I'm speaking from experience when I say that if you know how to program, you already know how to write Hoon. It's that intuitive.

Can you imagine how unbearable object-oriented programming would be if we couldn't use the words "object", "scope", "function", "class", and so on? None of these terms actually reflect the bits in the silicon; they're abstractions over the bits for the sake of mental modeling. Urbit's language is necessary for exactly this reason; it's technical, not cultic.

Binary trees as a fundamental data structure is not a bad idea, and it's also entirely clarifying for programming purposes. Don't you agree OOP has huge drawbacks?

Who's wasting time? I've memorized a number of text passages using one user's app for cloze completion. I've kept track of names and faces of users I've met IRL using the pals app. I've had an uncountable number of awesome and fulfilling conversations with other users of the platform, and no, I don't feel like I am in a cult because I can leave for weeks at a time and return at my leisure.

It's called "calm computing" for a reason - the technology serves your peace of mind, not some corporation's ad revenue.