The Verse Programming Language [pdf] • Hacker News Board

Re: The Verse Programming Language [pdf]

#31

Post by thelazydogsback » Sun, Dec 11, 2022, 9:52 PM UTC

Some of this reminds of me a combination Icon and Mozart. (And happened to just come across my old Icon book a few days ago.)

Maybe the backtracking concepts are "too built in?" - e.g., (1|2) is not a first-class/reified "amb" object, right? - so if I want to introduce a different search than depth-first backtracking (breadth, dependency-directed), etc., I couldn't directly.

Seems like there could be some confusion between multiple, backtracked values and actual sequences -- this often leads to sub-optimal/confusing Prolog code as well, deciding when you have an explicit control structure vs. backtrack, when to "harden" results using setOf/bagOf/findAll, etc.

Re: The Verse Programming Language [pdf]

#32

Post by mncharity » Sun, Dec 11, 2022, 9:53 PM UTC

Verse reminds me of Mozart/Oz[1][2].

I really liked Oz, and thought it had a lot of potential. But its documentation was a big adoption barrier (scattered mess plus expensive textbook), and Oz failed to escape being a turn-of-the-century European research and intro-CS language. The intro-CS role perhaps lends plausibility to Verse's "a first language" objective, despite the off-mainstream computation model. Explicit `amb` though.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oz_(programming_language) [2] http://mozart2.org/mozart-v1/doc-1.4.0/tutorial/index.html

Re: The Verse Programming Language [pdf]

#33

Post by grumpyprole » Sun, Dec 11, 2022, 9:54 PM UTC

AstixAndBelix wrote: post #9

AstixAndBelix wrote: post #3

The metaverse is a collection of 3D environments just like web2 is collection of documents. A webserver serves document while a metaverse server is basically a multiplayer videogame host. Your browser opens a metaverse site by downloading a game engine and running it through JS and fetches the resources from the server to load the 3D environments. All this to say: what has this functional programming language actuall…

ugh, so many downvotes and not a single person to explain why this is "a language for the metaverse" as opposed to being just "a new language"

Most mainstream programming languages are designed as if we are all targeting 70s von Neumann machines. When applying these languages to e.g. highly distributed or concurrent architectures, they are no longer a good fit. It's great to see at least an attempt at innovation rather than just a Java clone, which is all Google and Microsoft have ever offered so far.

Re: The Verse Programming Language [pdf]

#34

Post by truculent » Sun, Dec 11, 2022, 9:55 PM UTC

stefano_c wrote: post #29

rkrzr wrote: post #26

This looks incredibly ambitious: - There are no booleans in the language! Conditionals can still succeed or fail, but failure is defined as returning zero values and success is defined as returning one or more values. - Verse uses a so-called 'lenient' evaluation strategy which is neither strict nor lazy, but somewhere in-between ("Everything is eventually evaluated, but only when it is ready") - an expression does n…

> - There are no booleans in the language! Conditionals can still succeed or fail, but failure is defined as returning zero values and success is defined as returning one or more values. This is similar to how Icon works: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Icon_(programming_language)

Sounds like it's not a million miles away from how Clojure treats `nil` values, either

Re: The Verse Programming Language [pdf]

#35

Post by travisjungroth » Sun, Dec 11, 2022, 9:58 PM UTC

dan-robertson wrote: post #20

The metaverse angle doesn’t make much sense to me but whatever. The big idea I see is that prolog-style backtracking logic becomes a first class notion in the language – every expression denotes a sequence of values reached through backtracking-like behaviour – which allows mixing logic-programming with a more familiar kind of functional programming. Though perhaps there are other ideas too. I think it will be intere…

See slides 2 and 4. He has an idea of what a metaverse would look like and the technical challenges that will bring up. The language is meant to help solve them.

Re: The Verse Programming Language [pdf]

#36

Post by charcircuit » Sun, Dec 11, 2022, 9:59 PM UTC

>Kick functional logic programming out the lab and into the mainstream

Yet this presentation did none of that. There were no montivating examples on practical usage. The language does not map cleanly to webassembly, it instead reduces to a prolog like graph based execution model. In order to go mainstream you need to be solving more problems that existing languages have than you are creating by having someone use your new language.

Re: The Verse Programming Language [pdf]

#37

Post by rowanG077 » Sun, Dec 11, 2022, 10:00 PM UTC

leetrout wrote: post #11

Off topic but wow cannot believe someone used comic sans.

Why not? Comic sans is the most inclusive font.

Re: The Verse Programming Language [pdf]

#38

Post by tuukkah » Sun, Dec 11, 2022, 10:01 PM UTC

truculent wrote: post #34

stefano_c wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> - There are no booleans in the language! Conditionals can still succeed or fail, but failure is defined as returning zero values and success is defined as returning one or more values. This is similar to how Icon works: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Icon_(programming_language)

Sounds like it's not a million miles away from how Clojure treats `nil` values, either

Or the List monad.

Re: The Verse Programming Language [pdf]

#39

Post by giveexamples » Sun, Dec 11, 2022, 10:04 PM UTC

I dunno about slide 39 - where calling f(x) may or may not give x a value. From a code readability standpoint, a reader of the codebase needs to be wary of every function.

I see the issue is that iff you explicitly marked it as inout, it would limit the code from a logic unification point of view. I guess this is already explored in prolog, which I have little experience with - but it feels like it would inherently limit the ability to scale a codebase to huge sizes. Maybe a combination of convention and naming would solve the problem.

Re: The Verse Programming Language [pdf]

#40

Post by pizza » Sun, Dec 11, 2022, 10:05 PM UTC

phtrivier wrote: post #10

I honestly fail to see what properties of the language has anything to do with the metaverse, or millions of devs, etc... At first I though the "choice" construct would be a way to distribute code execution among multiple computers (using the fact that in a grandiose metaverse, everything would be a connected computer with lots of compute time to spare ?) but there is not much detail. Also it's not obvious from the s…

I guess I sort of see where it's coming from - the context is that hundreds of devs have to write code that has to preemptively cooperate with other code. So I think the lenient evaluation might be key for this.

Suppose you wander into a new environment, it contains some object x, and it has some capability f(x). Suppose your avatar or whatever has some code that already integrates with this f(x). You could just call f(x) in advance, and once you enter that environment, it lazily executes f(x). Or maybe I'm way off base here.