[seagreen]

The odd thing is unison started purely as a language. Now there's a platform.

I often find the best way to understand complex things is to dig all the way back to when they were being thought up. In this case there's a blog post from 2017 that I still find useful when thinking about Unison:

https://pchiusano.github.io/2017-01-20/why-not-haskell.html

Key quote:

Composability is destroyed at program boundaries, therefore extend these boundaries outward, until all the computational resources of civilization are joined in a single planetary-scale computer

(With the open sourcing of the language I doubt it will be one computer anymore, but it's an interesting window into the original idea)

Personally I find there's a lot to this. It's interesting that we're really, really good at composing code within a program. I can map, filter, loop and do whatever I want to nested data structures with complete type safety to my heart's content. My editor's autocompleting, docs are showing up on hover, it's easy to test, all's well.

But as soon as I want cron involved, and maybe a little state-- this is all wrecked. Also deployment gets more annoying as they talk about a lot.

So I think Unison always had to have a platform to support bringing this stuff into the language, even though they built the language first.

I'd love to hear some opinions from outside Unison about how they like using this language, tooling and hosting.

I'd like to hear this too.

Also, it would be great if there was something like https://eugenkiss.github.io/7guis/ or https://todomvc.com/ for platforms that we could use to compare Unison, AWS, etc etc. Or is there already a 7GUIs for platforms that I don't know about?