Reading half of it I'm struggling to see why they chose the semantic 'false?'. How do you read it? It sounds like a question, why not just 'false'?
The Verse Programming Language [pdf]
51–60 of 387 posts
Re: The Verse Programming Language [pdf]
#52It's cool to finally get some more details on this language. They showed some slides of it being used in Fortnite last year:
https://mobile.twitter.com/saji8k/status/1339709691564179464...
I believe it has roots in (but quite different from) Skookumscript
Re: The Verse Programming Language [pdf]
#53For those wondering if there's actually something relevant to the Epic's approach to the metaverse: there's not beyond slide 3. Everything after slide 3 is a description of the semantics of a novel functional logic programming language, the sort of which you'd expect you'd get if you paid the world's premier Haskell core contributor a large sum to design a new language. Of course its intended audience is Haskell academics, so perhaps it would be weird to expect anything else.
Slide 61 and 63 hint at things that might actually be of consequence to real programmers making real software for a potentially real metaverse, such as the effect system for I/O, transactional memory and code organisation through classes and inheritance, but it gives no detail.
If you're interested how elegantly functions like head, tail, cons, snoc, append and map might be implemented, this presentation is for you. If you're more interested in how you might unpack a message from bytestring, model a state machine or coordinate a group of actors in a distributed system, then I guess you'll have to wait for the next presentation.
Re: The Verse Programming Language [pdf]
#54I mean it's either genius, madness, or both. Most programming languages I can least understand the general gist, the core motivation, whatever. I have a lot of respect for Epic Games so I read through most of it but I have to say I'm still non the wiser. If forced to summarize I'd say.. it's some kind of Haskell-ish language where the types themselves are defined by ... runtime functions? With some attempt at also be…
Yeah. Super interesting concepts I hadn't come across before, but it's hard to see the motivation for the design choices, in light of the stated goal (which is itself a bit 'out there'). OTOH, it's in general a hard problem to predict the emergent characteristics of the ecosystem of a programming language just from the underlying design choices.
Re: The Verse Programming Language [pdf]
#55Every time someone gives a programming language a name that needs disambiguation terms for a decent google search, a puppy dies.
Re: The Verse Programming Language [pdf]
#56I guess someone will refrain using Verse
Re: The Verse Programming Language [pdf]
#57The 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.
Thanks. I re-read them but the metaverse angle still doesn’t make much sense to me. I don’t think that’s super relevant to the PLT stuff though.
Re: The Verse Programming Language [pdf]
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I’ve never seen a program that would magically be better on a distributed architecture if it was written in a different language. Programs run on a single core because they have a single core’s worth of work to do. Autoparallelization, like autovectorization, doesn’t work.
Re: The Verse Programming Language [pdf]
#59The 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.
I'd think the real interesting stuff would have been the transactional parts and the effects system. Unfortunately, these slides don't describe them; they just mention that they exist.
Re: The Verse Programming Language [pdf]
#60Off topic but wow cannot believe someone used comic sans.
Fun fact: Comic Sans is supposed to be easier to read for dyslexic people.
IIRC fonts specifically made for dyslexic people (e.g. OpenDyslexic) tend to be even better in that regard; if the goal is accessibility, one of those would be a better choice.