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The Verse Programming Language [pdf]

simon.peytonjones.org

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Re: The Verse Programming Language [pdf]

#71

Post by qayxc »

Avshalom wrote: post #16
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 mean logic languages have a history of... trying to be distributed but it's never really worked out.

My guess would be that it's the usual case of trying to solve a non-technical issue by throwing new technology at it.

I honestly cannot wrap my head around how a programming language of all things should solve the "millions of programmers working on a thing"-issue.

Re: The Verse Programming Language [pdf]

#73

Post by davidw »

qayxc wrote: post #65
davidw wrote: post #8

I'm not sure about the "learn it as a first language" bit. x:=(1|2); y:=(7|8); (x,y) This stuff just doesn't seem intuitive to me. It's not verbose enough to be obvious to someone who doesn't know what's going on. Looks interesting though; that's a really bright group of people. Be curious to see where their project ends up.

> I'm not sure about the "learn it as a first language" bit. I think this is very subjective. Our minds have been "poisoned" - or rather trained over years - into a very specific way of thinking about expressions like in the example. A first programming language, however, assumes that the learner hasn't been preconditioned in any way into a certain paradigm. So just keeping the two rules in mind that 1) evaluation is…

I get that to some degree, but that code doesn't look like something most people are exposed to, whereas 'x = 10' or something that says 'foreach' seems like it'd make sense with a minimum of explanation to a lot of people.

    x:=(1|2); y:=(7|8); (x,y)
Doesn't look like any math I'm familiar with.

Re: The Verse Programming Language [pdf]

#74

Post by bibanez »

tinco wrote: post #45
davidw wrote: post #8

I'm not sure about the "learn it as a first language" bit. x:=(1|2); y:=(7|8); (x,y) This stuff just doesn't seem intuitive to me. It's not verbose enough to be obvious to someone who doesn't know what's going on. Looks interesting though; that's a really bright group of people. Be curious to see where their project ends up.

I'll be the first to hate on C++, but the only reason C++ might be considered a "don't learn it as a first language" language, is because it's huge. It's got 40 years worth of baggage, and it's "standard" libraries are an absolute mess. Javascript has a super simple syntax, and it's standard libraries though sometimes a bit idiosyncratic are comparatively clean and pragmatic. If you just removed like 90% of C++'s use…

In my uni they still teach C++ as a first language, that's why the "don't learn it as a first language" got me confused. The core language is very useful for learning programming, it is actually very clean.

Re: The Verse Programming Language [pdf]

#76

Post by galaxyLogic »

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…

> sequence of zero or more values

You can try this type of programming at home, say in JavaScript Make any result or argument be an Array. The problem with nulls goes away because "not there" is represented simply by an empty Array (a.k.a "sequence").

And you will not get null-errors because you can write:

   newValue =   someValue.filter(...) . map(...) ;
You don't need to test whether filter() returns an empty array or not, the map() will work for empty arrays too but simply do nothing.

This is in a sense "generalized programming" because you don't deal with individual values but always with collections of them. I sometimes wonder why I don't use this pattern more often.

Re: The Verse Programming Language [pdf]

#77

Post by qayxc »

benji-york wrote: post #17

I'm sure they know a lot more about language design than I do, but the use of what is essentially SQL's NULL for boolean false doesn't feel like a good idea at first blush.

I didn't understand "false?" as a NULL value but more of a "Nothing"/"None" in the context of a Maybe monad. Since the language doesn't even have a Boolean equivalent, it makes sense to introduce a value for a failed condition or zero values.

The problem with SQL's NULL are its properties (comparison and arithmetic in particular), which doesn't seem to apply here (e.g. "42 + false? === false?, just as with monadic function composition and Maybe monads).

Re: The Verse Programming Language [pdf]

#79

Post by jbritton »

davidw wrote: post #73
qayxc wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm not sure about the "learn it as a first language" bit. I think this is very subjective. Our minds have been "poisoned" - or rather trained over years - into a very specific way of thinking about expressions like in the example. A first programming language, however, assumes that the learner hasn't been preconditioned in any way into a certain paradigm. So just keeping the two rules in mind that 1) evaluation is…

I get that to some degree, but that code doesn't look like something most people are exposed to, whereas 'x = 10' or something that says 'foreach' seems like it'd make sense with a minimum of explanation to a lot of people. x:=(1|2); y:=(7|8); (x,y) Doesn't look like any math I'm familiar with.

You can think of the choice ( | ) as a generator function. X generates 1 then 2. Y generates 7 then 8.

For x in [1,2]: For y in [7,8]: yield (x, y)

Re: The Verse Programming Language [pdf]

#80

Post by charcircuit »

smcl wrote: post #66
charcircuit wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The strategy is more about getting a first mover's advantage. Companies believe the metaverse is inevitable and they believe that it will become a big part of the everyday person's life. These companies want to be key players in this space. Look at the open ecosystem of the web and think about how much money ICANN and Verisign make from their DNS. Anyone can make their own independent DNS (see projects like namecoin)…

Oh I get it, but they're aiming for first-mover's advantage with the goal of being in control of something, not about implementing a lovely open ecosystem.

Why not both? Google may dominate search for websites, but anyone is free to create their own search engine for people to use.
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