Well, of course, Larry Wall is a god.

But that said, the main difference between Hoon line noise and Perl line noise is that most of the ASCII we use has a very regular structure, with a (relatively) limited set of exceptions. So it looks about equally alien at first, but the Hoon ideogram (digraph) set should be easier to learn. Unfortunately at present the set of people who know it is very small - so the theory really hasn't been tested.

It is what it is. But at least there's no Unicode. (Not that you can't have Unicode in strings, of course.)

And anyone who doesn't like line noise has to stand up for reserved words. Some of us welcome that conversation...