nballerina VS unison

oh boy -- lot's of work ahead for you folks, best of luck! I'll be watching this project. We do a ton with GCP so when this matures we'll be looking at it more.

How do you compete with -- if at all -- with Ballerina lang? https://ballerina.io/

PS: This advice stems from my personal experience while building BallerinaLang. We spent the first two to three years working with our own bytecode interpreter before we transitioned to JVM bytecode. Our LLVM backend is still under development and has a long way to go.

Considering your rich background in C++ and Haskell, along with your interest in functional programming paradigms, I wouldn't necessarily predict that Ballerina will "blow your mind." However, you might find certain familiar syntax while encountering numerous "why?" questions.

Ballerina actually showed some innovative ways to do it and is an interesting language to keep an eye on... finally, Unison decided to focus on its cloud offering and seamless distributed functional programming. Also a really cool language.

Last week I found Ballerina (https://ballerina.io/) via a comment here on HN, which got me thinking that I've gotten a bit out of touch with newer/up and coming languages in development. My guess is that, if I missed Ballerina before a week ago, I've probably missed quite a bit more.

What have I missed? And it would be cool to see where people are finding these types of things too.

https://ballerina.io/ and https://www.asyncapi.com/ seem like two efforts to move in this direction a bit for web APIs.

Reminds me of https://ballerina.io/

... which looks actually pretty nice, but I suspect the name of the project is a terrible marketing decision that will hold adoption back ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Short version: no type classes (yet)

Longer version:

Building upon what Quekid5 mentioned, Unison abilities are an implementation of what is referred to as algebraic effects in programming language literature. They represent capabilities like IO, state, exceptions, etc. They aren't really a replacement for type classes, though in some cases you can shoehorn abilities in where you might otherwise use a type class.

For someone coming from a Haskell background, I think that abilities are closer to a replacement for monad transformers. But in my opinion they are much more ergonomic.

Discusson of type classes comes up a lot. Here is a long-standing GitHub issue: https://github.com/unisonweb/unison/issues/502

For what it's worth, I've written Unison quite a lot over the past few years and while I've missed type classes at times, I think that reading unfamiliar code is easier without them. There's no implicit magic; you can see exactly what is being passed into a function. So far I've been happy with a bit more verbosity for the sake of readability.

I've been following the Unison lang [1] for quite some. Wing seem to set similar goals? From the first glance Wing looks more polished, but there's "The Big Idea" behind Unison - is there something similar?

[1]: https://github.com/unisonweb/unison

in haskell it looks like this, you specify the language extensions you want at the top of the source files: https://github.com/unisonweb/unison/blob/trunk/unison-core/src/Unison/ABT.hs

they adjusted my ticket to be a bug fix on their part.

I think Unison is going in this direction. Imo this is a mistake, as a program language functions not just as specification for the machine, but also as communication between programmers. Allowing the introduction of arbitrary dialects to suit individual preferences seems like it would interfere with that communication.