A friendly programming language from the future.
“Capabilities” is the new “Functional Programming” of decades prior,
Scala is also expanding in this area via the Caprese project: https://docs.scala-lang.org/scala3/reference/experimental/cc.html and it promises Safe Exceptions, Safe Nullability, Safe Asynchronicity in direct style/without the “what color is your function” dilemma, delineation of pure vs impure functions, … even Rust’s borrow checker (and memory guarantees) becomes a special case of Capabilities.
I believe this is a major paradigm shift, but the ergonomics have yet to be figured out and be battle-tested in the real world. Ultimately, like for Functional Programming Languages (OCaml, F#, Haskell, …) I don’t expect pionniers like Unison/Koka/Scala to ever become mainstream, but the “good parts” to be ported to ever the more complex and clunky “general purpose” programming languages (or, why I love Scala which is multiparadigm and still very thin/clean at its core).
It’s not really fair to state that functional languages aren’t battle tested or imply they aren’t useful in real world problem solving, Erlang/Elixir prove that.
functional languages aren’t battle tested or imply they aren’t useful in real world problem solving
Yup, I never said that, though? What I was about was to draw a parallel between functional programming languages and explorations from several decades ago vs the new languages and explorations going into effect typing/capabilities programming now (and the long way ahead for those).
What I find interesting is that those pioneering FP languages never came to top the popularity chart, implying that I’m not expecting Unison to be different (but the good parts might make it into Java/C#/Python/… many years from now).
I think that when it comes to functional programming with effect systems, unison is currently the closest to showing how it is actually done. Koka and languages like Effekt are of course very nice, but they don’t show much going for them besides the example nondeterminism and exception effect. Verse, that language that was going to be used as Fortnite’s scripting language, also plans on adding these effect systems a la Koka.
Overall, I think one of 2 things will happen:
- unison will slowly gain more and more adoption and grow out to become a formidable niche language
- Verse will blow unison out of the water and everyone who once even considered unison will be moving to Verse instead
unison is currently the closest to showing how it is actually done
What makes you say that? As far as I’m aware, even the theoretical soundness of it isn’t a done deal (this is a harder nut to crack than e.g. rust’s borrow checker)
Overall, I think one of 2 things will happen:
In this niche, perhaps, I don’t believe any of those will gain mainstream adoption (though I hope I’m wrong)
