I think the many of the ideas behind Urbit are exciting, but I don’t think it’s putting itself in a good position. It’s just too weird. If it used WebAssembly instead of some small, functional bytecode, you’d lose some beauty perhaps, but it’d be much more palatable.
Hoon does have some very nice security / usability things, that a plain WASM doesn't: every function call is pretty much a sandbox, everything is serializable and sandboxable (so you can eg. exchange code around safely), great reflexivity/inspectability, etc.
It looks weird, and names are weird (which IMO is unnecessary), but the underlying mechanisms are actually not that difficult to grasp.
