I LOVE the idea but the language itself is so ugly I don’t want to learn it. It looks really ugly. Sorry.
What's an example of a pretty language?
Scheme! :)
The Unison language – a new approach to Distributed programming
41–50 of 116 posts
Re: The Unison language – a new approach to Distributed programming
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
To be fair, for a while they were ALSO working on their own graphical source editor that allowed for type-correct transformations and assisted refactorings. They put that on the back burner specifically because they are trying to focus on fewer things :) I think the distributed computing problem is pretty related once you have "content-addressable" source code. Agreed that it's a lot of work but I hope it pans out!
I disagree, there's no real relationship between 'content addressable' source code and distributed computing. Also I don't think that you need to create a new language to have 'content addressable' source code distribution.. Creating yet another language ensure that this will get nowhere, too bad.
> Creating yet another language ensure that this will get nowhere, too bad.
What has happened before, consistently, is that research or proof of concept- style languages pave the way for bigger players to take the ideas and incorporate them into existing or future mainstream languages.
Re: The Unison language – a new approach to Distributed programming
#43How does the runtime manage different levels of trust between clients? How does the language grapple with code injection vulnerabilities? If I want to be able to receive data from an untrusted entity, but not code, how do I make sure they're not submitting code to my server to unpack and execute?
You can simply expose an HTTP endpoint that receives the data. You wouldn't want to expose the internode protocol endpoint to the internet.
That said, it wouldn't be as bad as it sounds. Unison is a purely functional language, so if you don't explicitly provide the ability to e.g. do arbitrary I/O, then other nodes will not be able to send you code that does I/O. It will not type-check.
Re: The Unison language – a new approach to Distributed programming
#44Re: The Unison language – a new approach to Distributed programming
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
What's an example of a pretty language?
Scheme! :)
Good news: the surface syntax of Unison is totally arbitrary and can in practice be swapped out. There's currently only one (Haskell-like) syntax, but in future I imagine there will be others. So you can imagine on https://share.unison-lang.org a little dropdown that lets you select what syntax you want to see the code in.
Re: The Unison language – a new approach to Distributed programming
#46I think they are making a mistake that's common in this sort of project: trying too many new things at once! They already have a very innovative way of managing source code, with a database of definitions that keeps the hash of the syntax tree instead of actual source. That's a very neat idea that solves many problems (read their docs to understand why). But instead of developing that well enough so that it works wit…
I thought that was sort of Paul's goal, to explore a bunch of new ideas and paradigms. I doubt he's under any illusions that this language, qua this language, is going to see wide adoption or need to have all of its features really ironed out with a fixed/stable API. But I could be wrong!
> I doubt he's under any illusions that this language, qua this language, is going to see wide adoption or need to have all of its features really ironed out with a fixed/stable API. But I could be wrong!
They have VC funding and employees. I presume he's told investors that it will see at least fairly wide adoption!
Re: The Unison language – a new approach to Distributed programming
#47Re: The Unison language – a new approach to Distributed programming
#48Nil nove sub sole ? It reeks of COOLs (Concurrent Object Oriented Languages). Here's an example of the mid 90s: https://distrinet.cs.kuleuven.be/projects/CORRELATE/
Object oriented? Unison looks pretty functional to me. And I don't see the content addressability, which is arguably the most important part.
Anyway, you'll very rarely see completely novel ideas in this space. Good combinations, compromises and applications matters a lot. Look at your favorite applied Merkle tree tool.
Re: The Unison language – a new approach to Distributed programming
#49I think they are making a mistake that's common in this sort of project: trying too many new things at once! They already have a very innovative way of managing source code, with a database of definitions that keeps the hash of the syntax tree instead of actual source. That's a very neat idea that solves many problems (read their docs to understand why). But instead of developing that well enough so that it works wit…
The two areas of managing source code and distributed computing are not as disjunct as you make them in the context of Unison. They follow from the underlying principle of addressing functions not by their name but by a hash of their normalized syntax tree (ie their code).
There are a bunch of cool implications for distributed computing, namely that you can easily distribute fine grained parts of your application across servers and that you can cache the result of expensive calculations.
Re: The Unison language – a new approach to Distributed programming
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
I thought that was sort of Paul's goal, to explore a bunch of new ideas and paradigms. I doubt he's under any illusions that this language, qua this language, is going to see wide adoption or need to have all of its features really ironed out with a fixed/stable API. But I could be wrong!
> I doubt he's under any illusions that this language, qua this language, is going to see wide adoption or need to have all of its features really ironed out with a fixed/stable API. But I could be wrong! They have VC funding and employees. I presume he's told investors that it will see at least fairly wide adoption!
Ha! Did not know that. Not necessarily dispositive though. Also, I believe they are a public benefit corporation so that would also cut in favor of my point...I think