New User Feedback

[phronmophobic]

Hi! I came across Unison based on reading about Effects Systems. I know that it is sometimes hard to get feedback from new or potential users so I try to do my best share my experience when I'm checking out something new. Maybe this experience report is helpful, but if it's not, feel free to disregard.

Based on my interest in checking out Unison, I ended up at https://www.unison-lang.org/learn/ which looks great. Before installing Unison, I was interested in reading more about what problems the language targets. I clicked on "What's next" since that's the only apparent action that might lead to more info. It turns out "What's next" doesn't navigate anywhere. Regretfully, I ended up clicking on the install link instead. After scrolling to the bottom of the install page, I did find link to https://www.unison-lang.org/learn/the-big-idea/ which is what I was looking for. The big idea post is really helpful. It may help to link to it directly from the learn page or even embed a short summary.

After reading about the big idea, I was still interested to learn more. The "Where to next" section gives links to talks and more info on the code base manager. Since I came to unison based on a reference about Effects Systems, I felt like I was at somewhat of dead end. What I wanted was a table of contents so that I can read more about effects systems. The links at the top of the page didn't seem to help me find what I was looking for either. It turns out that there is a very helpful table contents, but since I was looking at the page on my laptop, the screen wasn't wide enough for the table of contents to appear. The table of contents is accessible via the hamburger. As a site note, clicking on the sections inside the table of contents scrolls the window which makes it harder to explore.

Anyway, hopefully this feedback provides some utility. I'm looking forward to learning more about Unison.

[pchiusano]

Thanks @phronmophobic this is good feedback, cc @rlmark

I might move this issue to a discussion on https://github.com/unisonweb/community/discussions once I figure out how to do that… :)