iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Also the whole ListT situation is a bit of a mess.

And it's a "structural" ability, so you don't even need to depend on it if you don't want to; you can redefine it yourself and it will still be compatible :)

Totally. It's interesting too how in Haskell, Monad Transformers do tend to throw a wrench into things; in Unison the only thing you need to depend on is just a two line ability definition, then libraries can handle it however they like: structural ability Stream e where emit : e -> ()

In Unison it's great because producers use the Stream effect, and you can upgrade it to a Coroutine by just adding the `Ask` effect, they compose!

Obviously many other languages have a take on this, but in Haskell for example there are many different and incompatible kinds. Optimizing for specific use-cases is nice, but I think having a shared foundational and compatible interface wins out in this case.

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Another @unison-lang.org feature I think every language should have in some capacity: Streams! Unison's effect system makes them even more useful since you can interleave effects into your streams. A Stream or Coroutine abstraction is so useful as a way for libraries to consume or provide data.

191

I don't have to serialize some state machine, the code itself and the real Unison values are serialized for me by the language itself. Pretty cool 😎

It doesn't look like much, and that's kinda the point. That single line saves the full workflow seamlessly to a DB, it can be re-hydrated and continue running like nothing happened whenever the response is received whether in a second or a week.

No other language lets me write straight-line code like this. The `prompt` line saves saves the current continuation in a database, then sends a prompt to the user's browser to select a slot. When selected, `prompt` returns the in-memory @unison-lang.org object which corresponds to the chosen slot.

timeslotOptions : [calendly.TimeSlot]
timeslotOptions = calendly.listEventTimeslots calendlyToken startTime endTime
form = timeslotOptions
|> timeSlotsForm
(ts ->
( eventName ts
, calendly.TimeSlot.startTime ts
, duration ts
))
chosenSlot : calendly.TimeSlot
chosenSlot = prompt timeslotsForm

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Glad to hear you're back on your feet!

Chris Penner @chrispenner.ca · 30/07/2026

Also the only person who has permission to write his code in Comic Sans

Chris Penner @chrispenner.ca · 30/07/2026

I feel like a lot of metaprogramming tasks require a lot of "normalprogramming" experience, which is going to be tough for newer generations of programmers to acquire.

Chris Penner @chrispenner.ca · 30/07/2026

How do you feel about that change?

100

Chris Penner @chrispenner.ca · 28/07/2026

Thanks for writing this up Steve! I'm saddened that more infrastructure doesn't run on these ideas, but am heartened that it seems to be catching on lately, and aspire to build in support for these ideas in apps I build from now out!

Chris Penner @chrispenner.ca · 16/07/2026

More than ever, see this great Hank Green video on Jevons Paradox www.youtube.com/watch?v=IfvB...

youtube.com

Coal is Extremely Dumb

YouTube video by Hank Green

Chris Penner @chrispenner.ca · 19/02/2026

Happy to announce Unison Computing is branching out into consulting! iIf you'd like a hand with your project you'd be hard-pressed to find a better team to help, drop us a line 😎

070

Reposted by Chris Penner

Unison @unison-lang.org · 29/01/2026

📰 UCM 1.1.0 is out! * `dependents` can search by variant, not just type or ability name * New built-ins for Argon2id hashing * VS Code actions: Edit Definition & Open on Share * MCP tool: `share-project-info` * Faster bytes ops & improved run command

github.com

Release release/1.1.0 · unisonweb/unison

What's Changed Features: The dependents command now work on constructors and ability requests. (#6115) Support for "Edit Definition" and "Open on Share" in the Unison Language VS Code extension v1...

054

Chris Penner @chrispenner.ca · 25/01/2026

I made this tool for managing workshop sessions in tmux and I've used it *hundreds of times* per day every day for 6 years now without any hiccups; if you're looking for a good way to manage your terminal sessions maybe this is it. github.com/ChrisPenner/...

github.com

GitHub - ChrisPenner/session-sauce: Shell plugin for managing tmux sessions

Shell plugin for managing tmux sessions. Contribute to ChrisPenner/session-sauce development by creating an account on GitHub.

Chris Penner @chrispenner.ca · 21/01/2026

Unison's got a C FFI! 🎉 If you were waiting for a reason to try Unison, now's a good a time as any :)

093

Chris Penner @chrispenner.ca · 14/01/2026

"unspecified" behaviours are fun too, for instance in JSON duplicate keys aren't disallowed, and there was at least recorded case where a middleware validation layer used the first value of a key and the application used the last value of a key, which was never validated. Chaos ensues.

Chris Penner @chrispenner.ca · 10/01/2026

As it happens, labour is currently the primary means of non-upper-class folks getting the money they need to live, so any automation which threatens labour directly threatens their way of life. In order for automation to thrive it's important to first establish better systems for sharing value

140

Chris Penner @chrispenner.ca · 10/01/2026

Absolutely. When folks tell me about how much more productive AI has made them, my conversation with them goes like this: "Oh that's great! I'm sure you've gotten a raise then right? No? Oh well at least you must not work as many hours now right? No? What's that? Your co-worker got laid off?"

140

Chris Penner @chrispenner.ca · 04/01/2026

I hadn't heard of them but good shout, looks great! I'll give that a go 👍

Chris Penner @chrispenner.ca · 02/01/2026

I'm learning that the model for the fully-formed shape wasn't too bad, but splitting it up into individually printable parts for assembly is much trickier 🤷‍♂️

Chris Penner @chrispenner.ca · 02/01/2026

Learning more #OpenSCAD in order to bring a #kumiko inspired table-lamp to life :)

160

Chris Penner @chrispenner.ca · 20/12/2025

It's absolutely bonkers how much of modern society is still dependent on staying on hold for 2 hours on an unreliable connection when at any moment your thumb could slip or you could drop the call and there's just no way to get that call back except to wait another 2 hours 😑 #WestJet

050

Chris Penner @chrispenner.ca · 09/12/2025

When I'm feeling impure I go to Church to improve... hackage.haskell.org/package/free...

hackage.haskell.org

Control.Monad.Trans.Free.Church

070

Chris Penner @chrispenner.ca · 09/12/2025

In any active software project new bugs are always being introduced. Bugs that are important or easy to fix are typically prioritized. This means that as the project ages, the pool of bugs inevitably becomes a majority of the 'difficult to fix' or 'low-priority' variety 😢

070

Reposted by Chris Penner

Unison @unison-lang.org · 02/12/2025

🌟 It's time for #AdventOfCode! That means it's a great month to pick up a new programming language! Try it in Unison this year! 🎁

share.unison-lang.org

@unison/advent-of-code | Unison Share

🎄Template project with stubs for Advent of Code

092

Reposted by Chris Penner

Brian Hughes @bmhughes.bsky.social · 01/12/2025

This is actually quite brilliant, up to and including the final sentence 🔥

5682880111199

Reposted by Chris Penner

Kaushik Chakraborty @kaushikc.org · 26/11/2025

Sharing atproto-experiments: a foundation for building AT Protocol tools using @unison-lang.org . And the first tool is to sync Bluesky replies as @leaflet.pub comments. #atproto #unisonlang #leafletpub

notes.kaushikc.org

atproto-experiments

A foundation for building tools on the AT Protocol using Unison Programming Language.

3268

Reposted by Chris Penner

Eric Torreborre @etorreborre.blog · 15/11/2025

In "a new programming paradigm" Dejan Milicic goes into why @unison-lang.org is so unique and useful: docs.google.com/presentation...

docs.google.com

Unison: A New Programming Paradigm

print(("Unison", newline)); print("A new programming paradigm") Dejan Miličić JetBrains

1133

Chris Penner @chrispenner.ca · 25/11/2025

Want to try a radically innovative programming language? Unison is ready! Unison is approachable, user-friendly, and has a great community of friendly folks :) On top of that it has mind-bending features like serializable function closures and built-in distributed programming tools!

1316

Reposted by Chris Penner

Unison @unison-lang.org · 04/11/2025

🚀 New deep dive: Distributed System Engineering in Unison In our latest blog post, take a look at the design of the Volturno library: a distributed stream processing engine built atop Unison Cloud. www.unison-lang.org/blog/volturn...

unison-lang.org

Distributed system engineering in Unison: Volturno · Unison programming language

We look at the design of Volturno, a streaming engine with exactly-once processing, to illustrate why Unison Cloud is a great enabler for distributed systems builders.

0106

Reposted by Chris Penner

Unison @unison-lang.org · 28/10/2025

🤯 Unison in the browser!? Dan Freeman's new library, Proscenium, runs Unison code in WebAssembly. Its companion library, @dfreeman/playbill, contains a walk-through of various features and live examples on Unison Cloud! Play a game in your browser entirely in Unison; better yet, write your own!

share.unison-lang.org

@dfreeman/playbill | Unison Share

A walkthrough of building UIs with Proscenium, including several example apps.

074

Chris Penner @chrispenner.ca · 23/10/2025

Congrats Steve! Knock down those barriers to jj adoption one at a time! P.s. building a code collaboration is good fun with interesting challenges, I’m sure you’ll enjoy it.

000

Chris Penner @chrispenner.ca · 21/10/2025

Don't get too hung up on #Monads, there are other ways to sequence effects; including Arrows; and they provide even better static analysis! Let me know what you think :) #Haskell chrispenner.ca/posts/arrow-...

chrispenner.ca

Exploring Arrows for sequencing effects

Monads are <em>one</em> way to sequence effects, but they're not the only way!

1104

Chris Penner @chrispenner.ca · 17/10/2025

Can confirm that I’ve had nothing but problems with Spotify support. Dont worry though it’s not a sign of beef or anything, @danimalcannon.com and I are cool 😎

Chris Penner @chrispenner.ca · 15/10/2025

lol, and when I implemented my own public wrapper over it, and implemented `publicJWKFromPrivateJWK` the AI auto-complete confidently returned the private JWK as-is, asserting that the library "takes care of it for you" which AFAICT is NOT the case... the next generation of app security is cooked.

Chris Penner @chrispenner.ca · 15/10/2025

Even the #Haskell `jose` library doesn't have a separate type for public vs private JWKs, even a phantom type would do the trick. TBH this is just as bad as how generated certs are named key and key.pub; If you tab-complete you'll get the private one every time and there's no `.private` as a hint

Chris Penner @chrispenner.ca · 15/10/2025

I'd really like to speak with whoever thought it was a good idea for the public and private JWK's to be represented by the same type, have the same name, with just a few missing parameters... Ah yes, the presence or absence of this "d" parameter could tank my entire company... seems safe to me :|

Chris Penner @chrispenner.ca · 14/10/2025

At the moment I use STM as my lowest-level primitive; then leave it up to the STM implementors to use the mutexes haha. STM has all the channels, queues and vars you need to do any form of actors or CSP you like :)

Chris Penner @chrispenner.ca · 12/10/2025

Having a 3D printer at home is such a life-hack. Just printed some custom french-cleats to hang a giant 7ft long painting and it made it 10x easier.

030

Chris Penner @chrispenner.ca · 12/10/2025

My current thoughts: go down the list and use the first approach that you can fit your problem into: * Pipeline processing * CSP * Actors (a half dozen or fewer, statically defined) * STM * Mutexes (only ever use these if you're implementing STM 😆)