Join us for a virtual introduction to Unison and a discussion about its possibilities with one of its creators, Rúnar Bjarnason. Rúnar is the co-founder of Unison Computing and the author of Functional Programming in Scala.

Unison is an open source functional programming language based on a simple idea with big implications: code is content-addressed and immutable. This is the basis for some serious improvements to the programmer experience: it eliminates builds and most dependency conflicts, allows for easy dynamic deployment of code, typed durable
storage, and lots more.

The longer you spend with the odd idea of content-addressed code, the more it starts to take hold of you. It's not arbitrary or strange, but a logical and sensible choice with tremendous practical benefits. You start to appreciate the simplicity of the idea and see the need for it everywhere ("this would be a lot easier if the code were content-addressed..."). Is it really feasible, though, to build a programming language around this idea?…

Unison is an open source functional programming language with special support for building distributed, elastic systems. It began as an experiment: rethink all aspects of the programming experience, including the core language, runtime, tooling, as well as code versioning and publishing, and then do whatever is necessary to eliminate needless complexity and make building software once again delightful, or at the very least, reasonable.

We're used to thinking of a program as a thing that describes what a single OS process will do, and then using a separate layer of technologies outside of our programming languages to "configure" many separate programs into a single distributed, elastic "system". This gets complicated. The core language of Unison starts with the premise that no matter how many nodes a computation occupies, it should be expressible via a single program, not many separate programs. Unison programs can describe their own deployment, elastically scale and orchestrate themselves, and deploy themselves…

Пару дней назад мы завершили одно из самых эмоционально-заряженных событий, которое нам повезло проводить в рамках блога — хакерскую онлайн-игру с уничтожением сервера.  

Результаты превзошли все...