developers.urbit.org/content/overview/hoon.md

+++ title = "Hoon" weight = 30 +++

Hoon is a strictly typed functional programming language that compiles itself to Nock and is designed to support higher-order functional programming without requiring knowledge of category theory or other advanced mathematics. Haskell is fun but it isn't for everybody.

Hoon aspires to a concrete, imperative feel. To discourage the creation of write-only code, Hoon forbids user-level macros and uses ASCII digraphs instead of keywords. The type system infers only forward and does not use unification, but is not much weaker than Haskell's. The compiler and inference engine is about 3000 lines of Hoon.

Further Reading

• Hoon Overview: Learn why we created a new language to build Urbit in.
• Hoon School: A collection of tutorials designed to teach you the Hoon language.
• Guides: Guides to specific Hoon tasks, including testing, command-line interface apps, and parsing.
• Reference: Reference material primarily intended for Hoon developers with some experience.