[joyfulcoder]

I've been using Unison over Christmas.

I'm not affiliated with the company at all.

I built the start of a very basic site with Unison and HTMX.

https://cross-stitch-alphabet.netlify.app

In my day job I'm a Rails developer. I've been consistently frustrated at how few languages are truly composable and been getting increasingly disillusioned with mainstream languages.

So that's my context.

The not so great:

The language and principles are hard to learn. I've had to throw away what I already know about a lot of programming.

Coding inside ucm requires a very different mentality to how we build software.

The tooling is still early days and has many rough edges.

Performance is currently poor but will get much better shortly.

Abilities are incredible but demand the user to be very familiar with recursion.

Like many on here, I have lots of questions. It's not clear how migrations will work. I don't understand BTrees. If unison corp goes under what happens to my code?

Now for the good.

Unison is, hands down, the most radically joyful language I've ever used.

It's caused me to realise that most tools we use in software are faulty primitive compared with what they could be.

The fact is that even the benefits in the marketing of Unison are a scratching the surface of what's possible in this language.

For example, by spending a few hours I made the basics of an end to end testing library that emulates HTMX with local function calls.

This, if fleshed out, would mean the holy grail for me - fast cacheable end to end tests that do not require a browser to be spun up.

The possibilities are mind boggling.

I was utterly delighted with the deploy in a single function feature, something I'm now never going to be able to go back from having.

And deploying a database with schema in two lines is just jaw dropping.

Every time I use Rails now it's clear how much better our coding experience could be.

By building in Unison you get ports and adapters for free. Never have to wait for a test suite again. No infrastructure as code. No JSON. No yaml. Bliss.

In summary, it's radical. Would I run a production system on it yet? Nope.

Would I watch it keenly until it amasses a bit more momentum? You bet.

I believe whether unison succeeds or fails, this is the future of programming.

Oh and they're a delightful group of people to be around. The discord community has been beyond supportive to me whilst learning the language.