AoC 2020 — Getting Started with Unison

I’m starting Advent of Code late, but it’s okay. I don’t care about the leaderboard anyway, I just want to learn a few new languages.

My fiancee already completed all puzzles published to this point, and if I used a conventional language I’d have to try hard to get better asymptotic time complexity than her to save my male pride.

By using bleeding edge languages, I’m making it hard enough for myself, that I won’t feel the need to compete with her.

Hello Unison. Thank you for your help.

Unison so new that you have to join #alphatesting channel on their Slack to see the installation instructions.

Unison Codebase Manager is an all-in-one tool for everything Unison. I love it. The bundling here saves a lot of complexity. I liked that go fmt is built-in and belongs to the language, and I like Rust’s cargo even more. This is the way to go in 2020. Imagine there are people who write JavaScript and don’t use Prettier. Scary, huh? Point for you, Unison.

.> pull https://github.com/unisonweb/base:.releases._latest base
  Importing downloaded files into local codebase...


  Here's what's changed in base after the merge:

  Added definitions:

    1.    ability Abort (+2 metadata)
    2.    ability Ask a (+2 metadata)
    3.    unique type Author
    4.    builtin type Boolean
    5.    builtin type Bytes
    6.    builtin type Char

Nice one.

There’s no VSCode Language Server extension for Unison, but it’s less painful than I expected.

I wrote my first bit of Unison…

> List.map (x -> x * 10) [1,2,3,4,5,6]

And I immediately saw the result in my terminal.

It’s a bit like Quokka.js for TypeScript, but built into the language. Sweet. Of course, I’d prefer to see the result right next to the code, as I write it, but I know they’re working on an editor of their own, so this might be how it looks like in the future.

The lack of autocomplete will be a bit painful. I’ll have to read the docs in the browser of instead of “querying them” from the editor.

After a longer tour of Unison, I started with the first puzzle — Day 1 - Report Repair.