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The Unison language

unisonweb.org

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Re: The Unison language

#31

Post by refried_ »

jedimastert wrote: post #9

Maybe I've been out of the game or something. But I don't think saying everything is "content-addressed" can land as such of a big mic-drop moment when I've never heard the term or the concept in my life and the front page does absolutely nothing to explain it beyond that. ------ EDIT: My tone here is a little more antagonistic that I meant (proofread kids, don't just check for spelling and publish) but my first impr…

Hey; Unison author here—

Definitely appreciate this honest and helpful, specific docs feedback, so thanks for taking the time to put it together. We do want the value of Unison to be straightforward given even a quick skim of the site, so: sorry about the current state, we'll try to improve it. :)

Re: The Unison language

#32

Post by giancarlostoro »

One thing that takes away from programming languages is not having code samples on the index. I think this lets someone know immediately if it's interesting to them or not. Show a sample of code with the console output or a screenshot of an UI from the code. I think Racket had it right ages back. They would show everything from a web server, to other things. This is what major programming languages (with some exceptions) basically do and it gives a developer more information than any amount of marketing speak.

That said, I had to dig in the documentation to find code, and it didn't seem as obvious cause the syntax is definitely different from what I'm used to and there's weak syntax highlighting.

Re: The Unison language

#34

Post by blain_the_train »

giancarlostoro wrote: post #32

One thing that takes away from programming languages is not having code samples on the index. I think this lets someone know immediately if it's interesting to them or not. Show a sample of code with the console output or a screenshot of an UI from the code. I think Racket had it right ages back. They would show everything from a web server, to other things. This is what major programming languages (with some excepti…

Small code samples tell me next to nothing. How could they. I want a clear explanation of the foundational aspects.

Re: The Unison language

#35

Post by theamk »

nadam wrote: post #10
rzwitserloot wrote: post #6

Kudos to them for not using the buzzword, but if you believe in the notion that 'blockchain is just a fancy buzzword that gives developers the ability to get managers to agree to larger budgets to clean up tech debt', this is.. blockchain programming. One problem I did find: Somewhat deeper into the tour, the tour makes the claim: > a Unison codebase can be versioned and synchronized with Git or any similar tool and…

" I make the green 'OK' button now red, and you make it blue" I did not fully read the introduction yet, but in my mind, in a truly content-addressed system this is not a conflict: you have the hash of a main() function which ultimately makes the button red, and the other guy has a main() function that makes the button blue. No conflict in the physical sense. Yes, philosophycally there is a conflict, which is resolve…

Looks pretty practical to me? Here is a described situation:

Developer A made a change which adds feature X and makes a button blue.

Developer B made a change which adds feature Y and makes a button green.

Now the system does not allow both feature X and feature Y at the same time. Our options are either drop X, drop Y, or expend more effort/programming time to make a version which includes both X and Y.

The description above applies equally well to Unison code CAS system and regular program in git. Sure, one is at the file level, and other at the function level - but you still need same kind of tooling. You want to look at the changes and somehow produce a merged version.

Re: The Unison language

#36

Post by jedimastert »

refried_ wrote: post #31
jedimastert wrote: post #9

Maybe I've been out of the game or something. But I don't think saying everything is "content-addressed" can land as such of a big mic-drop moment when I've never heard the term or the concept in my life and the front page does absolutely nothing to explain it beyond that. ------ EDIT: My tone here is a little more antagonistic that I meant (proofread kids, don't just check for spelling and publish) but my first impr…

Hey; Unison author here— Definitely appreciate this honest and helpful, specific docs feedback, so thanks for taking the time to put it together. We do want the value of Unison to be straightforward given even a quick skim of the site, so: sorry about the current state, we'll try to improve it. :)

No worries. I guess it sounded a bit antagonistic, I apologize for that. I am actually interested in the idea, I was just a little frustrated that it was hard to figure out what was different about the language.

Re: The Unison language

#37

Post by dunefox »

blain_the_train wrote: post #34
giancarlostoro wrote: post #32

One thing that takes away from programming languages is not having code samples on the index. I think this lets someone know immediately if it's interesting to them or not. Show a sample of code with the console output or a screenshot of an UI from the code. I think Racket had it right ages back. They would show everything from a web server, to other things. This is what major programming languages (with some excepti…

Small code samples tell me next to nothing. How could they. I want a clear explanation of the foundational aspects.

I want both.

Re: The Unison language

#38

Post by Minor49er »

blain_the_train wrote: post #34
giancarlostoro wrote: post #32

One thing that takes away from programming languages is not having code samples on the index. I think this lets someone know immediately if it's interesting to them or not. Show a sample of code with the console output or a screenshot of an UI from the code. I think Racket had it right ages back. They would show everything from a web server, to other things. This is what major programming languages (with some excepti…

Small code samples tell me next to nothing. How could they. I want a clear explanation of the foundational aspects.

How can you choose a language without knowing the syntax? It's not arbitrary. Some languages have elegance or gotchas in how the syntax is laid out

Re: The Unison language

#39

Post by thesuperbigfrog »

ivanbakel wrote: post #3

Reading the tour[1], I got the impression of being struck by something not that surprising, but still fundamentally groundbreaking. Beyond just the idea of a global program store (which I hope has space for some virtualenv equivalent), the cleverness of effect handlers as a first-class language feature is very exciting. Once the type system is more mature, this could easily be the next kind of Haskell - a language wh…

Unison seems to combine ideas from Forth, Haskell, and Clojure's Datomic and stir them together into an interesting mix:

Forth ideas: a global dictionary with pre-existing and user-definable words

Haskell ideas: functional programming and type signatures of functions / words

Clojure Datomic ideas: immutable store of object definitions that append and use references to point to the latest definitions.

I am curious how I/O and error handling are done in Unison.

Re: The Unison language

#40

Post by pjmlp »

alipang wrote: post #4

Algebraic effect handlers no doubt seem to be the future of getting side-effects under control in programming languages, much like in the way of what immutability has done for data. My (admittedly little) experience with Unison though is that it's far from ready for the spotlight however. Much of the docs 404, and joining their discord mostly resulted in the advice to wait for future releases. I wish Microsoft would…

They already have F* for such type systems.

https://www.fstar-lang.org/

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