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by dthul
1822 days ago
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I agree that text files might not be the best way to store code. My point was more that all of the existing tools like code editors and version control systems have been designed around the concept of files though. And instead of Unison being able to tap into the existing ecosystem of tooling, they have to rebuild custom versions. Maybe there would be a way to map a Unison codebase onto the file system and back? Edit: also worth mentioning that thanks to specialized editors you don't need to manually browse through files but you can browse your code similarly to https://share.unison-lang.org if you so please. That's another plus point of the vast existing ecosystem, it already offers so much and it's a shame that Unison can't make use of it (at least for the moment). |
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The gist of it is that you can check out sections of code that you want to work on as a plain text file and you can do whatever you’d do with a text file: open it in your editor, syntax highlighting, copy/paste, whatever floats your boat. The cool part is that the “Unison codebase manager” (ucm) watches the scratch files and re-parses them whenever a file changes. I presume any syntax or type errors will be immediately shown in the ucm output. Cool, you say, but we can already do that with file watchers like `entr` and traditional languages, so why should I care? Well, it goes further.
You can start a line with a > character followed by an expression and the expression will be evaluated when you save the file, printing the output inside of ucm. It’s basically a REPL that you control from your editor. Cooler still, building on this concept is the `test>` prefix which, you guessed it, creates a unit test and runs it inside ucm, showing you whether it passed or not. And as a consequence of Unison’s content-addressable nature, after a test has run for a given expression’s content hash, the result is cached and the test doesn’t need to be re-run unless the hash changes (impure functions are soooo 2020). After you’re done with the scratch file, you can run `add` in ucm to add either certain parts (I think) or all of the work you’ve done in the scratch file to the source codebase, and this includes the tests that you wrote along with their cached values (I think)!
I personally find this workflow to be very compelling. To me, this approach is much akin to the source control that we do today, but it's actually aware of the context and meaning of the changes. Git, on the other hand, relies on weak heuristics to figure out what changed between versions of text-based files.
I am very happy to see projects that push beyond the boundaries of the paradigms we’ve been stuck in for the past 60+ years. I also find it quite funny that Hacker News, a forum centered around startups, can often be so conservative when it comes to new technologies.
[0]: https://www.unisonweb.org/docs/tour
[1]: https://www.unisonweb.org/docs/tour#unisons-interactive-scra...