There take on what they call capabitilites is very interesting. Basically anything that would make a function non-pure seems to be declared explicitely.

A computational effect or an “effectful” computation is one which relies on or changes elements that are outside of its immediate environment. Some examples of effectful actions that a function might take are:

• writing to a database
• throwing an exception
• making a network call
• getting a random number
• altering a global variable

The distributed computing aspect is very interesting, but the documentation is a mess. I applaud trying to use different and understandable terms than Haskell and other functional languages (monad, monoids, functors, applicative functor, etc.), but the examples are too verbose.

Concerning distributed computing, writing code that seemingly has no boundaries would be a major step forward for web development. Having to split models between client and server, come up with an API that follows some convention, find a solution for client-library generation, and so much more, is tedious, repetitive, and error-prone. Having most of that handled and having blurred boundaries would make writing web applications pleasurable again.

At the moment, unison looks like an iteration on the right path, but there is a lot of work to do in making it accessible and understandable.

Literally the opposite of friendly. Already in the hello world you have two imports for extremely basic functionality (why should I have to import the ability to throw exceptions??) and a completely enigmatic symbol ’ that apparently has a significant function.

A “friendly” programming language should be readable without knowing esoteric symbols.

Really got my hopes up with that headline that it’d be a python-level intuitive-to-read language with static typing.