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Unison: a next-generation programming platform

unisonweb.org

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Re: Unison: a next-generation programming platform

#51

Post by dalek_cannes »

davedx wrote: post #44
jackmaney wrote: post #2

Pro 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…

Pro tips: * Be courteous when offering constructive criticism (that means, for example, don't swear at people) * Often it's not the project owners posting things on HN - many projects aren't necessarily ready for public consumption when they end up on here * This doesn't even appear to be a "product". It's an open source project that seems to have been recently put out there Absolutely typical that this is the top ra…

Agreed. It's disturbing that there are so many members who are seemingly intelligent, but either haven't read the guidelines or think that guidelines don't apply to them.

Re: Unison: a next-generation programming platform

#52

Post by [deleted] »

bcg1 wrote: post #12

On the surface it sounds interesting, but I don't really buy the idea that programming is terribly limited by the quality of text editors. Even "basic" editors like vim and emacs can almost instantly catch most syntax problems, and IDEs like Eclipse and Visual Studio are great about complaining if you make a mistake. In my experience, these days relatively few problems come from language syntax errors ... most proble…

[deleted]

Re: Unison: a next-generation programming platform

#53

Post by benihana »

davedx wrote: post #44
jackmaney wrote: post #2

Pro 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…

Pro tips: * Be courteous when offering constructive criticism (that means, for example, don't swear at people) * Often it's not the project owners posting things on HN - many projects aren't necessarily ready for public consumption when they end up on here * This doesn't even appear to be a "product". It's an open source project that seems to have been recently put out there Absolutely typical that this is the top ra…

>Hacker News, you SUCK.

Very constructive and courteous.

Re: Unison: a next-generation programming platform

#55

Post by zwegner »

This looks really awesome. I hope it takes off! I'm pretty curious what it looks like though--as much as it shouldn't matter, syntax is very important.

There's a lot of overlap with how I want my language Mutagen[1] to work. Merkle trees of syntax, details persistence/communication handled transparently (or at least orthogonally to any other program logic). Where I think this is most important though (and this description of the project doesn't seem to mention) is optimization. Things like database de-/normalization, data locality, and really so much more--pretty much everything engineers do for performance rather than business logic--should be in the hands of the compiler. Mutagen has been on hiatus for a while, but I've been thinking about it a lot more lately, thinking where to go next. If anybody is interested in it, let me know--I'd love some contributors to work with, or even just people interested in optimization/compilers/functional programming to talk to.

[1]https://github.com/zwegner/mutagen

Re: Unison: a next-generation programming platform

#56

Post by pchiusano »

Wow, author here, was not expecting this to end up here! This project is very much in development, it's not close to a finished product and I hope I didn't give that impression. I created the site so there'd be a space other than my blog to share updates about progress and so on. If everything I wrote sounds like nonsense, check back in 6 months. I am hoping things will be much further along, and more concrete by then. It will get there.

I definitely appreciate the feedback from folks about how it is unclear what the project even is from the descriptions. I am still trying to figure out the best way to explain it succinctly (so far haven't been too successful). Having a better demo to show would definitely go a long way.

This might help a little bit - here's a video and some explanation of the expression editor from my blog: http://pchiusano.github.io/2015-03-17/unison-update5.html The platform is going to be more than just the editor, but that might provide a feel for what the editing experience could be like. Obviously many details and polish to be worked out.

Re: Unison: a next-generation programming platform

#57

Post by MrBra »

vezzy-fnord wrote: post #15

Unison is also already the name of a file sync program written in OCaml, a team collaboration service, a proprietary newsreader and apparently a security management (access control/intrusion detection/firewall/etc) platform. The file sync is probably the most popular, and the one that first came to mind. I realize that the exclusive namespace for software titles is shrinking, but I think that when you already have th…

It was also the name of a popular general midi soundfont :)

Re: Unison: a next-generation programming platform

#58

Post by hyperpallium »

jackmaney wrote: post #7
ripter wrote: post #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.…

>> 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 ti…

Maybe the author started this project some years ago, before parsing and network libraries were common? Because if you don't have libraries, he's right.

Starting from scratch can yield radically better solutions than how tech/market happened to evolve.

Re: Unison: a next-generation programming platform

#60

Post by hydandata »

> 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.

Off-topic but.. by using Lisp one can refocus that 70% to actually solving problems.

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