Hi Future of Coding folk! I am Sam. I realized I had never introduced myself here even though I have been around for a while. I am a Software Engineer from Brazil. I have been into programming for the past 10 years. All this time I felt there was something suboptimal with the way we program today, both for fun and for work. That’s what motivated to start the unit project https://unit.md. My initial approach for creating a new visual language was to go reference-less, so I would have to implement it from scratch, based mostly on intuition. I also wanted unit to feel like an “alien tool”, untied from the current state of the art aesthetics and user experience. I felt we had all these cool Computer Science, Systems Programming and Design concepts, but no readily accessible fully visual system attempting to incorporate them all. My take was that this was a fundamentally a Software Engineering problem; it would likely take years for one to develop something like that. One day a friend saw the prototype and mentioned Victor Bret. Later I was touched watching “Inventing on Principle”. That was my entrance to this rabbit hole; you know the rest. I can simply hear Allan Kay say something like “Recursive Design” and that is it. That is enough for me to start pursuing an year long new system feature. I usually come here looking for some inspiration. Maybe some Programming Language concept I haven’t heard of, a fancy Structured Editing demo or some curated paper. It is impossible to compress all the cool stuff! Finally, I am very thankful for the existence of this community! Good job everyone!

Hi Samuel, I've found Unit quite tantalizing for a couple of months, but don't yet understand it. I go to unit.land and try clicking and dragging around, and I can see it responding to my taps, but it's not clear anything is being created. Do you have any tutorials or videos showing how you build little programs with it?

Alternatively, would you be willing to demo Unit on a call? I bet there'd be a bunch of folks here who would love to watch you demo what you've built and ask questions. They do this sort of workshop+Q&A thing over on the Ink&Switch discord, and it's a lot of fun, so it'd be great to try something like that ourselves. I think Unit would be perfect for this, if you're up for it.

Checkout the Getting Started @Kartik Agaram https://unit.md/src/docs/start (not a tutorial, but helpful)!

I realized one problem. I had to open https://unit.land on a separate tab to start to make sense of https://unit.md/src/docs/start. With hindsight, I was being dumb not to realize that. But I think I was also approaching it with the sort of partial attention that's all too common these days. What is this thing, and why does it move around in a distracting way?

This is why I'd love to set up a workshop with @Samuel Timbó — (DM me if interested) — we could see how they work within the tool, and talk about the ideas behind these design choices. Even if it's just a brief glimpse, even if there are a lot of rough edges, I think it's worth considering things that have no direct analog to the ways we normally code.

The bot has been very useful for recording educational gifs (it feels like it is doing everything! ;)); one interesting characteristic of the unit system is that the user doesn’t need to content with any particular design choice; everything is customizable; for instance, if you enter inside the

IO

unit, you can delete the

bot

code (you’d have to fork your own unit environment though). @Kartik Agaram

Hello from Rio! 👋