Cloud computing has gotten complicated, excluding a large majority of developers who don't have the time or inclination to become cloud infra gurus. How did this happen?? 🧵

(If this resonates with you, we're hiring! unisonweb.org/jobs/ RTs welcome 🙏) Programs today are based on a limited model of what computing is: a program describes what a single computer does. To build a "software system" occupying more than one node, you stitch together lots of separate programs with glue and duct tape. That is -

Authoring microservices in Unison is going to be awesome, because microservices can be made compositional and higher-order, which simplifies a lot and reduces communication boilerplate to zero. Imagine being able to build dozens or hundreds of services, all elastically scaled, and compose them in a type-safe way into other interesting services, about as easily as you would call ordinary functions.

A common question about Unison: if defs don’t change, how do you make edits to a definition after it’s already accumulated a bunch of transitive dependents? 1/ Basic idea is similar to “updating” a purely functional data structure - you don’t literally mutate it, but instead produce a new structure which shares much of the old. 2/