Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Unison language

unisonweb.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 144 posts

Re: The Unison language

#51

Post by giancarlostoro »

dudul wrote: post #46
Minor49er wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

How can you tell the elegance or gotchas from a 6 line Hello World?

It's how I picked my favorite Python web framework, I compared all the hello world samples they all had, and wound up with CherryPy. The rest had too many decorators and it just looked silly to me.

You can also figure out if it's C-like or Lisp-like, and so on from looking at syntax.

Re: The Unison language

#52

Post by giancarlostoro »

dunefox wrote: post #37
blain_the_train wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I want both.

That's the ideal amount of information.

A reasonable example of a good page that is informative and provides lots of examples (enough at least!) is the one for D:

https://dlang.org/

Re: The Unison language

#53

Post by neurobashing »

dudul wrote: post #46
Minor49er wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

How can you tell the elegance or gotchas from a 6 line Hello World?

you can infer a lot; is it LISPy, is it C-ish, or one of the Haskell family, etc. I think you can tell a lot from just which family of syntax.

Re: The Unison language

#54

Post by kowolkian »

Hell yea, we can finally move forward with editors now. No more saving files with syntax errors. I imagine you could move a lot of paredit functionality into an editor like this, or have excellent voice editing.

Re: The Unison language

#56

Post by thesz »

dudul wrote: post #46
Minor49er wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

How can you tell the elegance or gotchas from a 6 line Hello World?

For many programming languages the line count of "hello, world!" program is exactly one.

So you can deduce something just from a line count of simple program alone - for one such deduction is an answer to a question "are there at least some attempts to provide useful defaults?"

Re: The Unison language

#57

Post by chhickman »

thesz wrote: post #56
dudul wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How can you tell the elegance or gotchas from a 6 line Hello World?

For many programming languages the line count of "hello, world!" program is exactly one. So you can deduce something just from a line count of simple program alone - for one such deduction is an answer to a question "are there at least some attempts to provide useful defaults?"

I agree that a Hello World is fairly useless example for anyone already familiar with programming languages. Perhaps something like a Fibonacci function should be the de facto short syntax example, as is common in functional languages. More useful though would be to have an example of how composition data structures work in the language - standard example could be a binary tree.

Re: The Unison language

#58

Post by ktpsns »

Tade0 wrote: post #44
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…

Perhaps this is the reason: https://www.unisonweb.org/docs/language-reference#a-note-on-...

Interesting. Maybe they should add further representations of the code. This is not the only language where there are mutliple representations of the same "code".

Wolfram Mathematica (or "the Wolfram language") introduced "forms" for that, for instance https://reference.wolfram.com/language/ref/FullForm.html or https://reference.wolfram.com/language/ref/InputForm.html or, quite charming in the math context, https://reference.wolfram.com/language/ref/TraditionalForm.h... or https://reference.wolfram.com/language/ref/TeXForm.html -- See also https://reference.wolfram.com/language/tutorial/EverythingIs...

Re: The Unison language

#59

Post by vidarh »

tobr wrote: post #50
Minor49er wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Syntax is easy to show, but ultimately rather unimportant. If the big idea of a language is something substantial, starting by showing the syntax arguably just creates a distraction.

Syntax stops me from even considering some languages, because to a lot of us it is important. I spend most of working hours reading code; as a result how easy it is to read is important not just for my productivity, but for my overall happiness in life.

A small sample on the front page will not tell me if a language is good enough, but it can give me an idea if it's worth spending more time reading up on it or not.

Re: The Unison language

#60

Post by [deleted] »

the_duke wrote: post #11
nadam wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

" 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…

Of course there are still conflicts everywhere. Developer A makes the button red, developer B changes the label from "OK" to "Accept", both inside the same function. You can't just pick one or the other, you have to combine the changes. Or two developers add two different fields to a type. Or ... Sadly the docs only have placeholders for "Concurrent work and resolving edit conflicts" and "Pull requests and collaborat…

[deleted]
Post reply on HN