A friendly programming language from the future.

  • dneaves@lemmy.world
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    11 months ago

    Although, i would agree with it not necessarily being “friendly”, since its a drastically different syntax than many beginners would be used to, the brackets and parenthesis here are not what you think they are.

    Unison is a language in the style of Haskell, F#, Purescript, Elm, etc. So that first line is actually type annotations.

    In Haskell, this would just be helloWorld :: IO () , meaning a function named “helloWorld” with no arguments and produces what is essentally a potentially-unsafe IO action with a Void return (the empty parenthesis () ).

    Here in Unison they call the bracket part “abilities” or something. Its saying the same thing as Haskell, but being more explicit in saying it can raise an exception.

    • abhibeckert@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      Yeah sorry - that’s just unnecessarily obtuse. Programming languages just don’t need to be that convoluted. Hello world should look something like this:

      print("Hello, World!")
      

      And when you need more complexity, it can still be far simpler than Unison (or Haskel). For example this (in Swift):

      func processNumbers(_ numbers: [Int]) -> [Int] {
          return numbers.filter { $0 % 2 == 0 }.map { $0 * $0 }
      }
      
      let numbers = [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6]
      let processedNumbers = processNumbers(numbers)
      print(processedNumbers)
      
      • dneaves@lemmy.world
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        11 months ago

        Hello world should look something like this: print("Hello, World"!)

        You don’t need the annotation line in Haskell-esque languages, most of the time. Without the annotation, this is Hello World in Haskell:

        main = print "Hello, World!"
        

        And when you need more complexity, it can still be far simpler than Unison (or Haskell)

        import qualified Data.List as List
        import Data.Function ((&))
        
        processNumbers numbers =
            let
                isEven n = mod n 2 == 0
            in
            numbers
                & List.filter isEven
                & List.map (^2)
        
        main =
            processNumbers [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6]
                & print