Journal entry for February 8, 2024

Reading Unison’s “Our Approach”

https://www.unison.cloud/our-approach/

Starting off, I vibe with their

Actual programming

Logical. Compositional. Typed. Amazing.

Building for the cloud

A garbage fire of unguessable nonsense.

meme very much! Whenever I have to exit my programming language and use a completely parallel tool I feel a lot of anxiety. It’s better with Nix but Nix doesn’t manage your state or do other things your regular programming language does.

The rest of the post details their “dream in 3 parts”:

• deployment from within your programming language (amazing)
• typed distributed programming, sold as “calling services should be easy”
• using storage should be as easy as using in-memory data

The last section “Why is it so complicated, anyway?” (answer: you program a little box/process but going outside it is pain) is also lovely. I’m looking forward to trying Unison out ASAP!