"Nouns don't have cycles" in two senses. Abstractly, a noun as defined is a tree and trees don't have cycles. So there! :-) Concretely, the Nock interpreter,

"Nouns don't have cycles" in two senses. Abstractly, a noun as defined is a tree and trees don't have cycles. So there! :-) Concretely, the Nock interpreter, which Hoon compiles itself to, has no way to construct a "noun with cycles," like your A == [A A]. I sense that this is what's really bugging you. :-) Of course, Nock is written in C and uses a C data structure. When we manipulate this data structure from C, we can certainly construct all the degenerate "nouns" we like. This generally results in a quick trip to the noun hospital. I'm genuinely surprised at how few acyclic programming languages exist. True, there are plenty of algorithms with faster asymptotic runtime given cyclic/mutable data structures. There are lots of ways to manage this problem, though. And both for persistence and network transmission, acyclic structures are just much easier to handle. You'll notice that all major network data models (XML, JSON) are acyclic, as are SQL and NoSQL databases alike. Cyclic databases exist [1] [2], but they're very much the exception. And of course, acyclic data models mean you don't need a tracing garbage collector. Are doubly linked lists, etc, really worth a tracing garbage collector? Anyway, in a language/OS where transmitting and persisting state are core features, acyclic data seems like a pretty easy choice. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_model https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_model [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object_database https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object_database