Comment by cflewis

Unison tries to swallow the whole elephant all at once, which is probably what the author is getting at.

* `ucm` is like a coding assistant that sits with you the whole time. You don't grep through code to find snippets or anything, you use `ucm`. It does a whole lot more, but that's just the trivial example.

* You need `ucm` because Unison stores code as a syntax tree, not text. This is awesome because versioning/dependency conflicts/rename issues just go away. This is not awesome because nothing else knows how to understand this: other source control systems will just not work.

* It's really trying to drag functional coding into this decade and what we use code for in production. It's not trying to be Haskell which is a great language, but doesn't (to me) feel like it was designed to do something like a simple web app.

* It is supposed to do distributed cloud computing without modification (this smells like where the VC money came from), but again, you have to use their platform because other clouds don't understand Unison.

The list goes on.

Each individual piece of Unison I think is really great. I love the `ucm` model of having an assistant sit next to you the whole time. What I don't love is that there is just _so much_ learning placed on the developer. To understand Unison, you need to understand a lot of what they're doing, a lot of what they are doing is novel, and so you have to eat the whole elephant that they are. I don't know if there was a path where they could have eaten the elephant one bite at a time, but it really makes the onboarding onerous.