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A look at Unison: a revolutionary programming language

29 pointsby bubblehack3rover 2 years ago

2 comments

yshavitover 2 years ago
I&#x27;ll keep it on my radar, because at an intellectual level it seems pretty interesting. But this smells a bit of &quot;fun computer science, not terribly useful software engineering.&quot;<p>Firstly, my experience with Haskell left me pretty skeptical of pure programming languages. They&#x27;re just that much harder to grok; debugging becomes harder (though it looks like this language has log functions, so it&#x27;s not <i>totally</i> pure FP?), `for` loops are just easier to think about than folding, etc.<p>But beyond that, the problems this language tries to address just don&#x27;t seem like the real problems I face. Let&#x27;s take a few:<p>• distributed programming: shipping bits of opcode (whether it&#x27;s machine code, Java bytecode, etc) is easy. The hard part is knowing <i>which</i> bits to distribute where, especially when they have to operate on shared state. I don&#x27;t see how hashing ASTs helps with that.<p>• no builds: I mean sure, that&#x27;s nice I guess. But tbh, I spend very little of my day or mental energy waiting for compilation.<p>• dependency conflicts: The bad ones of these don&#x27;t arise from name conflicts — those are easy to get around. The bigger problems are things like two dependencies that each depend on different versions of the same library, and you want them to communicate: you want DepA to talk to DepB via some object defined in DepC that they both use, but DepA and DepB use different and incompatible versions of DepC. Hashing doesn&#x27;t seem to fix this.<p>Now, that doesn&#x27;t mean people shouldn&#x27;t learn this, especially if they find it interesting. I don&#x27;t use Haskell at all, but I think I&#x27;m a better programmer for having learned it, because it made me think of things in a new way. This language could well be similar — but I don&#x27;t see it replacing mainstream languages.
scrubsover 2 years ago
Ditto: keeping on my radar. Unison was unknown to me so appreciate the post in HN. Thanks op.