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by mgax 1305 days ago
I LOVE the idea but the language itself is so ugly I don’t want to learn it. It looks really ugly. Sorry.
2 comments

It's ML syntax. I'm also not used to it, but many who are consider it beautiful.
Its certainly a turn-off for some. One thing that we have as a potential future effort would be to enable an alternate surface syntax. Since we store an AST insteead of source code, we could create a parser/pretty printer for another surface syntax. Then a user of the language who would prefer something that looked like python could switch our website's renderer to output the python like syntax!
What's an example of a pretty language?
I don't think this language is ugly and it is indeed hard to say which language is objectively beautiful, but I personally have always disliked syntax that uses the ' operator for some reason. It's small - it looks like a piece of dirt on the screen, which makes it hard to read. I imagine the same arguments could apply to the '.' or ',' operators, though ' tends to appear around whitespace, while ./, around characters, so there's at least some contextual information around them.
I really hate the language but I have to say Python does at least look quite nice.
Yes it does look nice, but I wonder how you'd do eg pattern matching on ADTs...
Scheme! :)
Good news: the surface syntax of Unison is totally arbitrary and can in practice be swapped out. There's currently only one (Haskell-like) syntax, but in future I imagine there will be others. So you can imagine on https://share.unison-lang.org a little dropdown that lets you select what syntax you want to see the code in.
Perl4