I've been following Unison for a long time, congrats on the release!
Unison is among the first languages to ship algebraic effects (aka Abilities [1]) as a major feature. In early talks and blog posts, as I recall, you were still a bit unsure about how it would land. So how did it turn out? Are you happy with how effects interact with the rest of the language? Do you like the syntax? Can you share any interesting details about how it's implemented under the hood?
> Unison is among the first languages to ship algebraic effects (aka Abilities [1]) as a major feature. In early talks and blog posts, as I recall, you were still a bit unsure about how it would land. So how did it turn out?
No regrets! This Abilities system is really straightforward and flexible. You find yourself saying that you don't miss monads, if you were already of the FP affiliation. But were glad that it means that you don't have to understand why a monad is like a burrito to do FP.
> Do you like the syntax?
So this one is very loaded. Yes we LOVE the syntax and it is very natural to us, but that is because most of us that are working on the language had either already been fluent in haskell, or at least had gotten to at least a basic understanding to the point of of "I need to be able to read these slides". However we recognize that the current syntax of the language is NOT natural to the bulk of who we would like to be our audience.
But here's the super cool thing about our language! Since we don't store your code in a text/source code representation, and instead as a typechecked AST, we have the freedom to change the surface syntax of the language very easily, which is something we've done several times in the past. We have this unique possibility that other languages don't have, in that we could have more than one "surface syntax" for the language. We could have our current syntax, but also a javascript-like syntax, or a python-like syntax.
And so we have had lots of serious discussions recently about changing the surface syntax to something that would be less "weird" to newcomers. The most obvious one being changing function application from the haskell style "function arg1 arg2" style to the more familier "c?" like style of "function(arg1, arg2)". The difficulties for us will be trying to figure out how to map some of our more unique features like "what abilities are available during function application" onto a more familiar syntax.
So changing the syntax is something that we are seriously considering, but don't yet have a short term plan for.
Unison is among the first languages to ship algebraic effects (aka Abilities [1]) as a major feature. In early talks and blog posts, as I recall, you were still a bit unsure about how it would land. So how did it turn out? Are you happy with how effects interact with the rest of the language? Do you like the syntax? Can you share any interesting details about how it's implemented under the hood?
[1]: https://www.unison-lang.org/docs/fundamentals/abilities/