Unison: a next-generation programming platform
unisonweb.org
Unison: a next-generation programming platform
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Re: Unison: a next-generation programming platform
#2Pro Tip: if I have to dig through eight paragraphs of fluff to find out what the fuck your product is, then you REALLY need to rethink the description of your product.
In particular, it was not at all clear what was meant by a "programming platform". Until I finally stumbled onto the description below, I thought it was just another web-based IDE.
> What is the Unison platform? At a high level, it consists of three components:
> * The Unison language: a powerful, typed, purely functional underlying programming language
> * The Unison editor: a rich, in-browser semantic editor for editing programs
> * The Unison node: the backend implementation of the Unison language, its typechecker, and the API used by the Unison editor and other remote nodes in the network
> The collection of Unison nodes (the Unison web) form a network platform in which data and functions may be trivially exchanged, with a minimum of friction.
Re: Unison: a next-generation programming platform
#3> Perhaps 70% of developer time is spent dealing with parsing, serialization, and persistence. Values are encoded to and from JSON, to and from various binary formats, and to and from various persistent data stores… over and over again.
This is not my experience at all. I've spent maybe an hour or two in the last few months on parsing, serialization, and persistence. For the work I do, these are all solved problems.
> Another 25% is spent on explicit networking. We don’t merely specify that a value must be sent from one node to another, we also specify how in exhaustive detail.
Honestly I'm not sure what the author means by this. If I have a value others might want to know about, I just trigger an event. There is no "exhaustive detail' going on. (Plus events are easy to grep).
>Somewhere in between all this plumbing code is a tiny amount of interesting, pure computation, which takes up the remaining 5% of developer time. And there’s very little reuse of that 5% across applications, because every app is wrapped in a different 95% of cruft and the useful logic is often difficult to separate!
Boiler plate code used to be an issue, but the languages I still use have ways around it. (macros, first class functions, extending, etc). We build modules and libraries and controls, all reusable code that lets me spend most of my time being bored in meetings.
Re: Unison: a next-generation programming platform
#4Alright, I made an honest attempt to read through all of it but I still have a fuzzy understanding of what you are trying to achieve with this project. I understand our current development tools might not be the best, but if I understand this right you are essentially making a framework into a language with an editor with said language? I don't see that moving away from the model we have now, simply moving things lower in the stack. Maybe Im just not understanding.
Re: Unison: a next-generation programming platform
#5How does this differ from other next-generation web platforms like Opa?
Also, why does this need to re-use the name of a next-generation file synchronization tool?
Re: Unison: a next-generation programming platform
#6Show, don't tell.
Re: Unison: a next-generation programming platform
#7> Perhaps 70% of developer time is spent dealing with parsing, serialization, and persistence. Values are encoded to and from JSON, to and from various binary formats, and to and from various persistent data stores… over and over again. This is not my experience at all. I've spent maybe an hour or two in the last few months on parsing, serialization, and persistence. For the work I do, these are all solved problems.…
>> Perhaps 70% of developer time is spent dealing with parsing, serialization, and persistence. Values are encoded to and from JSON, to and from various binary formats, and to and from various persistent data stores… over and over again.
> This is not my experience at all.
Yeah, unless you're tinkering around in a side project just to learn something, don't build your own JSON parser or writer.
I've spent WAY more time thinking about how to structure my data for serialization than how to serialize it. For the vast majority of use cases, serialization is such a solved problem that if there isn't an obvious way to proceed, you're probably doing it wrong.
>> Another 25% is spent on explicit networking. We don’t merely specify that a value must be sent from one node to another, we also specify how in exhaustive detail.
> Honestly I'm not sure what the author means by this.
Doing low-level socket programming? Maybe? But in the grand scheme of things, that's probably a fairly specialized use case.
Re: Unison: a next-generation programming platform
#8Show, don't tell.
But if you're going to tell, be concise and coherent.
Re: Unison: a next-generation programming platform
#9Posterchild for TL;DR
Re: Unison: a next-generation programming platform
#10Pro Tip: if I have to dig through eight paragraphs of fluff to find out what the fuck your product is, then you REALLY need to rethink the description of your product. In particular, it was not at all clear what was meant by a "programming platform". Until I finally stumbled onto the description below, I thought it was just another web-based IDE. > What is the Unison platform? At a high level, it consists of three co…
As with many things in life, there's also a relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/927/