Unison Lang -- possible Joe Armstrong connection

I recently came across the Unison programming language. Their “big idea” of Unison is hashing every definition and syntax tree. This seemed reminiscent of something Joe Armstrong mentioned in a talk about doing away with URLs and so forth. I can’t remember which talk it was exactly. If anyone else knows which talk that was I’d like to rewatch it to see if there’s any real connection.

Unison appears to lean heavily on Haskell, but I wonder if this approach is something that BEAM languages might leverage as well.

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Here is the talk

And his blog post
https://joearms.github.io/published/2015-03-12-The_web_of_names.html

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Shout out to shout out by José :raised_hands: Unison
Might try to solve an aoc challenge with it since they’re promoting it. :santa:

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I played around with unison some time ago. Super interesting ideas, especially the core idea of hashing definitions but also the effect system (“abilities” ? :thinking:)

If I remember correctly they didn’t went with an open source license because they imagined it to be tightly integrated with a runtime cloud environment and raised money to realize that. Do you know if that’s still the case?