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Unison: a next-generation programming platform

unisonweb.org

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Re: Unison: a next-generation programming platform

#111

Post by Animats »

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's also a category of inventions, "Unison devices", which refer to ways to keep two things in sync. This was a huge problem from about 1850 to 1980 or so. Edison's stock ticker was one of the first big successes, but it wasn't really nailed until the invention of the phase-locked loop. (Anyone remember "horizontal hold" knobs?)

Re: Unison: a next-generation programming platform

#112

Post by seanmcdirmid »

Ericson2314 wrote: post #110
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…

One of the mantras of functional programming is get your data structure right, and everything else falls into place. As an experienced functional programmer, I see this in practice every time I program--even a slightly "wrong" type pollutes the code dramatically. The idea then with structure/tree/semantic editors is two-fold. First, text is obviously the wrong the wrong data structure for programs, so even if people…

Functional programming kind of screws itself when it comes to "implementing" modern good IDEs; the aversion to state makes it difficult to implement good tree-incremental error resistant parsing and type checking that is usable in a language aware editor.

I've developed plenty of advanced IDE infrastructure; e.g. see

http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/people/smcdirm/managedti... and http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/liveprogramming...

The trick was abondoning FRP-style declarative state abstractions (which was my previous research topic) and moving onto something that could manage state in more flexible ways (as we say, by managing times and side effects instead of avoiding them). And once you nailed the state problem, incremental parsing, type checking, and rich editing are actually easy problems.

Re: Unison: a next-generation programming platform

#113

Post by smosher_ »

This could be interesting.

An observation: users have accepted that computing is organized as a constellation of rigid software appliances (“apps”) that never seem to work well together and certainly can’t be composed or extended

And yet, unless I have sorely misunderstood, Unison's editor is a browser-based thing, which creates a barrier much more rigid than the ones surrounding the tools I use today.

A question: does this just make web apps? I don't do webdev and nobody bothers to mention it these days when they presume all the programming you do is for the web.

Re: Unison: a next-generation programming platform

#114

Post by tome »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #112
Ericson2314 wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the mantras of functional programming is get your data structure right, and everything else falls into place. As an experienced functional programmer, I see this in practice every time I program--even a slightly "wrong" type pollutes the code dramatically. The idea then with structure/tree/semantic editors is two-fold. First, text is obviously the wrong the wrong data structure for programs, so even if people…

Functional programming kind of screws itself when it comes to "implementing" modern good IDEs; the aversion to state makes it difficult to implement good tree-incremental error resistant parsing and type checking that is usable in a language aware editor. I've developed plenty of advanced IDE infrastructure; e.g. see http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/people/smcdirm/managedti... and http://research.microsoft.com/en-…

Can you give some more detail about what you replaced FRP with? Sounds interesting.

Re: Unison: a next-generation programming platform

#115

Post by tome »

wtetzner wrote: post #106
kyllo wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but you have to finish typing the syntax first, and the IDE that is constantly parsing your code file is always going to report errors as the code goes through a broken state while you're typing. That's one thing Unison is trying to fix.

> That's one thing Unison is trying to fix. Is that actually a problem? If you're never allowed to input incomplete/broken code, then the way you program is very limited. Often I like to start writing a function, get to the point where I realize I need another function, write that one, and come back to the first function. In an editor where only working code can be input, you can't do this style of programming, which…

This sounds implausible. How can you run your intermediate program if it's missing a function? I don't see that accepting only well-typed programs changes anything, and furthermore it applies to all typed languages not just ones that enforce well-typedness by construction.

Re: Unison: a next-generation programming platform

#116

Post by seanmcdirmid »

tome wrote: post #114
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Functional programming kind of screws itself when it comes to "implementing" modern good IDEs; the aversion to state makes it difficult to implement good tree-incremental error resistant parsing and type checking that is usable in a language aware editor. I've developed plenty of advanced IDE infrastructure; e.g. see http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/people/smcdirm/managedti... and http://research.microsoft.com/en-…

Can you give some more detail about what you replaced FRP with? Sounds interesting.

I replaced it with glitch. It was actually something I started developing for the scala IDE a long time ago that had to integrate easily with scalac, so it had to handle the limited set of effects performed by it (they no longer use this in the scala plugin, but initial results were promising, and being very incremental dealt with scalac's performance problems).

I've refined the technique over the last 7 years, you can read about it in a conference paper:

http://research.microsoft.com/pubs/211297/onward14.pdf

You can think of Glitch as being like React with dependency tracing (no world diffing) and support for state (effects are logged, must be commutative to support replay, and are rolled back when no longer executed by a replay).

Re: Unison: a next-generation programming platform

#118

Post by totemizer »

_pmf_ wrote: post #117

I'm not sure that implicitly calling your target customers lazy and/or inefficient is such a great introduction.

I am sure in the history there were some slaves which were inefficient, and I wouldn't say that it was their fault. I think a lot of decisions are made without asking the developers. Those decisions then impose situations when planning for more than 3 months is meaningless, so we tend not to. And there we are quite inefficient, especially from an external point of view. Don't take offense where there is none.

Re: Unison: a next-generation programming platform

#119

Post by zapov »

pchiusano wrote: post #56

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 the…

As someone with a "similar" platform, I too am rather surprised this end up on HN frontpage ;(

Few questions:

* how is your editor different from MPS (except being browser based)?

* how does your project compares to an implementation on top of language workbenches?

* do you think your assumption about time spent on a project is mostly Haskell related or is that for some specific types of projects?

* are you thinking about implementing some framework of your own or do you have some other in mind?

* do you plan on integrating with existing libraries or write your own implementation?

And comments:

* for me good IDE feels like semantic editor. I'm inclined to believe that text based editor can have all the good features of semantic editor and avoid most of the bad ones.

* while writing simple structures one time and reusing them vertically in a project is useful, it's doubtful that it's worth while. It becomes worth while only if you have project in multiple languages/technologies. But mostly if you can do refactoring automatically (even database schema migrations).

* try to explain your project better, this should help you with narrowing it's scope. Most of the people will try to fit it into some category they are familiar with so emphasize the distinctions.

Good luck! ;)

Re: Unison: a next-generation programming platform

#120

Post by thenomad »

jimfleming wrote: post #74
pchiusano wrote: post #56

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 the…

Ok, so I spent about an hour casually reading the posts, watching the demo videos and glancing at the code. I agree with your premise and I like a lot of the implementation so far. It's great to see more innovation and research in this area alongside Light Table, Eve (which seems to be going in a similar direction with spreadsheets), NoFlo and others. I'm curious about the goals of the project. If the goal is to repl…

Where are the demo videos? Couldn't find those and I'd be very interested to see them.
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