Unison: A Friendly Programming Language from the Future Part 1 – Runar Bjarnason | Hacker News Reader

Unison: A Friendly Programming Language from the Future Part 1 – Runar Bjarnason

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10 pointsNezteb5 comments

I've followed Unison for a while, but this talk (along with Part 2) blew me away. I downloaded Unison locally and have been going through its Exercism.org track to learn. I've been having a lot of fun with it!

Some past threads:

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9512955 (128 comments from May 8th, 2015)

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20807997 (25 comments from August 27, 2019)

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27652677 (131 comments from June 27th, 2021)

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34307552 (84 comments from January 9th, 2023)

That being said, this conference talk was only put on YouTube on January 21st, 2023, so I figured I'd share.

Here's a couple awesome blog posts from Dave Thomas on the language as well:

- Immutable Code in Unison (https://pragdave.me/discover/unison/2023-02-26-immutable-cod...)

- Abilities: a New Way to Inject Behavior and State (https://pragdave.me/discover/unison/2023-03-11-abilities/)

Interesting ideas, but "from the future" is a rather bold claim since some of the concepts were already present in systems like Lotus Notes or Groove Workspace, and it will be difficult to convince developers to go away from file based development (remember the term "big ball of mud" for Lisp or Smalltalk images).

Who convinced the developers to make a "big ball of mud" and ignore software development process advice ;-)

"At the outset of a project involving two or more programmers: Do assign a member of the team to be the version manager. … The responsibilities of the version manager consist of collecting and cataloging code files submitted by all members of the team, periodically building a new system image incorporating all submitted code files, and releasing the image for use by the team. The version manager stores the current release and all code files for that release in a central place, allowing team members read access, and disallowing write access for anyone except the version manager." (page 500)

1984 "Smalltalk-80 The Interactive Programming Environment"

https://rmod-files.lille.inria.fr/FreeBooks/TheInteractivePr...

Looks nice for ETL like data processing. But to be honest, with how good the tooling of big data frameworks has become nowadays + ChatGPT I dont really see that much of an advantage using this. It looks like this project is trying to solve problems we had 10 years ago, which is in fact the time this language has been in development.

The syntax looks like a mixture of Haskell and F#

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