The Verse Programming Language [pdf]

I don't think it is an overstatement to say that that imaginary world C++ would have been deprecated by Rust.

C++ complexity is also its strength. Highly backward compatible, even with C, and multiparadigm. It has classes, but you don't have to use them, it has exceptions, but you don't have to use them, it has templates, lambdas, smart pointers,... and again, you don't have to use them, but they are here if you need them. Even the "deprecated" features of C++ (like most things related to raw pointers) are heavily used today, even in new projects, because they are useful.

Strip 90% of "deprecated" C++ and what you get is essentially Rust, but worse because it still has its C baggage without the advantage of being mostly compatible with C.

Except, as the slides indicate, sequences of values are not sets. They are ordered. You can also, as they mention, refer to "y" in the definition of "x". This is like set union, but it is, again, sensitive to ordering of elements.

Yup, you can. Also in Clojure, like this:

( true

This essay opens with comments about utility for the metaverse but then switches to a description of a grammar without strongly connecting back to why it is so valuable for programmers to learn a new language to better build the metaverse. It may be helpful but is it that much more helpful?

I understand this is a pet project for these folks but I think that a metaverse grammar should not fe functional but procedural - it should be extremely simple and accessible to novices. We want these tools to be accessible to everybody I think - unless we as programmers want to be responsible for building all interactions for all users.

But I mostly think a grammar today isn’t just about the literal parser - instead it is more about the parser and surrounding tooling. Rust for example is surrounded by tooling that helps - cargo/crates are a nice helpful way to make rust developers effective.

If I was going to devote significant energy to this topic I’d solve other problems. Any code that users write needs to be late binding - allow software agents to be pushed to the cloud and participate in already running simulations or models. Code should allows users to define granular security around libraries and components to prevent them from doing bad things. Code should be highly portable; able to run across many devices at speed - not something new that has low cross platform support.

I think a better way of thinking about this isn’t the grammar itself but the kind of “computational sandbox” one is offering - the grammar container or app runner.

WASM is a good example of thinking in a better way - portable, secure, performant. It’s more like a metaverse tool than the above grammar.

What’s especially curious to me is that Tim’s project Unreal is almost the anti-metaverse. It is utterly fixated on and built around an extremely heavy high fidelity renderer - that is not portable - that does not run across many devices. Unreal uses an old school compilation philosophy that requires behaviors to be precompiled - so if you want to add a single feature you have to tear down all the instances, recompile them, recompile the server too, distribute a new build to all participants and restart the sim. It’s a tool designed for a different era and a different ecosystem… in a sense AAA games are the opposite of a participatory constantly evolving online shares consensual world. So maybe he should fix that first.

I absolutely agree, but this comment referred to the library size as a major burden.