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# What on Earth is Unison?

A developer experience report

Unison is interesting. I got to know the language a bit coding up solutions to the direct and indirect problems of geodesy with it. It is a new language so small annoyances and problems are expected but none of the bug reports I made were show stoppers. Here I share my initial impressions of the developer experience.

# Geodesic Problems

1. The direct or forward problem:
• x The departure point on the ellipsoid.
• α₁ The azimuth from the departure point.
• s The distance to the arrival point.

Given the above inputs, find:

• y The arrival point.
• α₂ The azimuth at the arrival point.
1. The indirect, inverse or reverse problem:
• x The departure point.
• y The arrival point.

Given the above inputs, find:

• s The distance between departure and arrival points.
• α₁ The azimuth at the departure point.
• α₂ The azimuth at the arrival point.

I’ve been working on a reference implementation for scoring free flight competitions. For this I need to be able to find the distance between two points on the Earth, the s of the indirect solution.

# Flying Geodesics

Pilots flying cross country competitions in hang gliders or paragliders carry flight computers with sensors for position and air pressure. The vario beeps vary in tone, rapidity and volume as we climb or sink. Sound really is the best way of taking in this information as the pilot is often too busy in active air to be glancing at or tapping a smallish screen. It is great to be climbing but worrying to be sinking and tones emitted by the vario match those moods.

Except for respecting airspace, height is pretty much ignored when scoring. It is however used for stopped tasks to fairly reward pilots for being higher than others. A pilot that could have converted height to distance if time had allowed for the glide will get a bonus distance. Scoring is not simple but boils down to initially finding out when and where each pilot crossed the start, turnpoint cylinders and goal of the tasked course for the day and from there finding out how far a pilot flew and how much ahead of other pilots were they during the race.

A comp can be scored against a sphere or an ellipsiod. The FAI sphere and the WGS84 ellipsoid are the only two models of the Earth sanctioned by the FAI for scoring. For the sphere we’d likely calculate distance using haversines formula and for the ellipsoid we might use Vincenty’s formula or other faster but less accurate solutions. Solutions for the ellipsoid are iterative and do not work near the poles, not that we fly competitions in those regions. It is cold enough at cloudbase when scorching hot on the ground.

# Familiar Territory

FS is the official free flight competition scoring program of the world governing body for air sports (the FAI - Fédération Aéronautique Internationale). It will likely be retired and succeeded by Airscore1. I’ve helped a little on both projects but have spent most of my energy on flare-timing. FS is a C# winforms Windows-only desktop app and Airscore is a python flask web app. Both roll some of their own geodetics code and I have too, in Haskell for flare-timing and in F#.

# Unison’s Development Environment

The development environment is special. The code is stored in a database, parsed as an abstract syntax tree with nodes identified by hash and metadata attaching names to those hashes. What this means in practice is that neither you developing your code or someone browsing your repo will see anything that looks like code.

In practice this is no big problem. There are ways to discover and browse the code. I’m used to working in a REPL with little more than syntax highlighting as a language specific aid in the editor. Unison’s code base manager watches for changes in a scratch file I’m editing and on start up provides a link where the code base can be browsed.

> unison

The Unison Codebase UI is running at
http://127.0.0.1:61119/lUbPTPoxXjHHcTWH9MwOoaKzhJiYyQts/ui

Now starting the Unison Codebase Manager...
Welcome to Unison!
You are running version: release/M2g
I'm currently watching for changes to .u files under ~/.../flat-earth
Type help to get help. 😎

When code I’m working on in the scratch file compiles I can add it to or update it in the code base. Like git, I can choose to push my changes to a repo with builtin commands. The whole experience is quite sensitive to current namespace selected. We can move around namespaces with the namespace or cd commands and use ls to see what’s there:

> unison

.> cd flight
.flight> ls

1. Earth/        (46 definitions)
2. Geodesy/      (69 definitions)
3. LatLng/       (15 definitions)
4. Units/        (43 definitions)
5. Zone/         (3 definitions)
8. patch         (patch)

Using commands to navigate namespaces and definitions that have the same names as commands we’re used to for navigating the file system is great and could be taken further. Sadly a cd .. command doesn’t go up the namespace tree.

To work on an existing definition, find it and select it for editing:

.> find haversines

1. flight.Geodesy.Math.EarthMath.Haversines : EarthMath

.> edit 1
☝️
I added these definitions to the top of ~/.../flat-earth/scratch.u

unique type flight.Geodesy.Math.EarthMath
= Pythagorus
| Haversines
| Vincenty
| AndoyerLambert
| ForsytheAndoyerLambert
| FsAndoyer

You can edit them there, then do update to replace the definitions currently in this
namespace.

To edit this definition, I’m better off navigating to its namespace first to avoid long namespace qualified names and to avoid a bug where fully qualified names cannot be added or updated if the current prompt is at .>, the root namespace.

.> cd flight.Geodesy.Math
.flight.Geodesy.Math> edit EarthMath
☝️
I added these definitions to the top of ~/.../flat-earth/scratch.u

unique type EarthMath
= Pythagorus
| Haversines
| Vincenty
| AndoyerLambert
| ForsytheAndoyerLambert
| FsAndoyer

# Teething Problems

The pretty printing and parsing doesn’t roundtrip. Printed constructor parentheses were missed and indentation was offside. This was an inconvenience but I pretty quickly recognized the edits I’d need to make to dumped definitions to get them to compile again.

aOfHaversine : LatLng -> LatLng -> Rad
aOfHaversine x y =
use Float * +
use Lat Lat
use Lng Lng
LatLng (Lat xLatF) (Lng xLngF) = x
LatLng (Lat yLatF) (Lng yLngF) = y
(dLatF, dLngF) =
use Float -
(yLatF - xLatF, yLngF - xLngF)
Rad (hLatF + (cos xLatF * cos yLatF * hLngF))

It was easy to make updates that resulted in names coming unstuck from hashes especially when renaming things.

.flight.Geodesy> find InverseSolution

1.  unique type InverseSolution s α
2.  InverseSolution.InverseSolution : s -> α -> Optional α -> InverseSolution s α
3.  InverseSolution.doc : Doc
4.  InverseSolution.s : #7l8qisp5pk s α -> s
5.  InverseSolution.s.modify : (i ->{g} o) -> #7l8qisp5pk i α ->{g} #7l8qisp5pk o α
6.  InverseSolution.s.set : s1 -> #7l8qisp5pk s α -> #7l8qisp5pk s1 α
7.  InverseSolution.α₁ : #7l8qisp5pk s α -> α
8.  InverseSolution.α₁.modify : (o ->{g} o) -> #7l8qisp5pk s o ->{g} #7l8qisp5pk s o
9.  InverseSolution.α₁.set : α₁1 -> #7l8qisp5pk s α₁1 -> #7l8qisp5pk s α₁1
10. InverseSolution.α₂ : #7l8qisp5pk s α -> () α
11. InverseSolution.α₂.modify : (() α ->{g} () α) -> #7l8qisp5pk s α ->{g} #7l8qisp5pk s α
12. InverseSolution.α₂.set : () α -> #7l8qisp5pk s α -> #7l8qisp5pk s α

Some very ordinary float functions are missing from the base library such as Float.isNaN and related predicates for testing infinity. I also encountered a bug in float comparison:

Now evaluating any watch expressions (lines starting with >)... Ctrl+C cancels.

1 | > 0.0 < 0.0
⧩
false

2 | > 0.0 < 1.0
⧩
true

3 | > 1.0 < 2.0
⧩
true

4 | > +0.0 < +1.0
⧩
true

5 | > +1.0 < +2.0
⧩
true

6 | > -1.0 < 0.0
⧩
true

7 | > -2.0 < -1.0
⧩
false

8 | > -1.0 < -2.0
⧩
true

There’s no pattern matching or type deconstruction in arguments to functions. I have that in Haskell and F# and miss it.

Some of the property tests I’d like to have added were not possible without float generators that are not yet included.

I couldn’t get the code I wanted to write to compile with the trunk branch and ended up using the latest release/M2g branch but even there I had to backport an interpreter fix to prevent a missing integral case exception when using less than when comparing floats.

# Overall Impression

Unison is a new language with a distinctive and unusal development environment yet I was able to get what I wanted to do done, helped along by good documentation, excellent talks and quick feedback in the slack channel.

The builtin find command and code base browsing web app are great but I still think I’d like to be able browse a subset of the codebase on disk as files in the appropriate branch of a namespace tree. Once I saw I could dump a lot of definitions to the scratch file then move them beneath the fold so that they were only visible to me I was happier.

I really like transcripts.

> unison transcript.fork Haversine.md

Transcript will be run on a copy of the codebase at:
/Users/pdejoux
Running the provided transcript file...
⚙️   Processing stanza 3 of 3.
💾  Wrote ~/.../flat-earth/Haversine.output.md

> unison transcript.fork Vincenty.md
⚙️   Processing stanza 5 of 5.
💾  Wrote ~/.../flat-earth/Vincenty.output.md

I used transcripts to document what the code does for both the haversine solution and Vincenty solution to the geodetic inverse problem. Shown below is a snippet of the output of the transcript for the Vincenty solution:

✅

ellipsoids.u changed.

Now evaluating any watch expressions (lines starting with
>)... Ctrl+C cancels.

1 | > bessel
⧩

2 | > hayford
⧩
Ellipsoid (Radius 6378388.0) 297.0

The code base manager works well as one tool with a command shell, a REPL and git-like code base actions.

The cached tests and definitions seem to hold a lot of promise to save developer time. I can’t say I noticed but isn’t that the point!

The task I was solving didn’t require anything fancy so I can’t say much about the unison language itself other than it is similar enough to Haskell or F# that it felt familiar already except I suspect I don’t quite understand when to use let.

I enjoyed trying out unison and contributing a package2.

1. FAI-Airscore implements the Andoyer method for solving geodesic distance on the ellipsoid but it can get distances by using package haversine for the sphere and package geopy for the ellipsoid.↩︎

2. The code in the blockscope/flat-earth repo can be found at contrib/pdejoux in unison share, the common code base, where we can link directly to definitions such as this one for InverseSolution.↩︎