Type system of Fortnite's Verse language

#1

Post by ghuntley » Wed, Mar 29, 2023, 9:29 PM UTC

Type system of Fortnite's Verse language
brianmckenna.org

Re: Type system of Fortnite's Verse language

#2

Post by AceJohnny2 » Wed, Mar 29, 2023, 10:54 PM UTC

Tangential, and because I had to look it up:

> Verse has been designed by some people who really know what they’re doing: Lennart Augustsson, Joachim Breitner, Koen Claessen, Ranjit Jhala, Simon Peyton Jones, Olin Shivers, Tim Sweeney

The listed people are all luminaries of the functional programming world (and adjacent, like theorem proving and software verification), particularly Haskell. Hell, Simon Peyton Jones is one of the creators of Haskell.

My point is, the creators of Verse aren't just a bunch of coders (pejorative) who felt like creating Yet Another Language.

Re: Type system of Fortnite's Verse language

#3

Post by AceJohnny2 » Wed, Mar 29, 2023, 10:56 PM UTC

AceJohnny2 wrote: post #2

Tangential, and because I had to look it up: > Verse has been designed by some people who really know what they’re doing: Lennart Augustsson, Joachim Breitner, Koen Claessen, Ranjit Jhala, Simon Peyton Jones, Olin Shivers, Tim Sweeney The listed people are all luminaries of the functional programming world (and adjacent, like theorem proving and software verification), particularly Haskell. Hell, Simon Peyton Jones i…

Nevertheless, I've yet to see an explanation of what problem Verse aims to solve that isn't solved by other languages out there.

It's still very early (while announced last year, it was only just shown at GDC last week!) so I expect we'll be hearing a lot soon.

Obviously, the association with Fortnite won't do it any favors. They claim they want

Re: Type system of Fortnite's Verse language

#4

Post by illiarian » Wed, Mar 29, 2023, 10:58 PM UTC

AceJohnny2 wrote: post #2

Tangential, and because I had to look it up: > Verse has been designed by some people who really know what they’re doing: Lennart Augustsson, Joachim Breitner, Koen Claessen, Ranjit Jhala, Simon Peyton Jones, Olin Shivers, Tim Sweeney The listed people are all luminaries of the functional programming world (and adjacent, like theorem proving and software verification), particularly Haskell. Hell, Simon Peyton Jones i…

Or they might be just creating a Yet Another Language precisely because they are luminaries of functional programming. Those often tend to chase a yet another unattainable dream of "the one true functional language".

When you type the words "the really know what they are doing" when talking about a language for game programming, I would expect people who know about game programming first, and about language design second.

There's a reason C/C++ and even C# are the go to languages for game programming, and not Haskell.

For example, the only presentation we've seen so far literally talks about Yet Another Language without mentioning a single problem it solves for game programming.

Re: Type system of Fortnite's Verse language

#5

Post by 542458 » Wed, Mar 29, 2023, 10:59 PM UTC

AceJohnny2 wrote: post #2

Tangential, and because I had to look it up: > Verse has been designed by some people who really know what they’re doing: Lennart Augustsson, Joachim Breitner, Koen Claessen, Ranjit Jhala, Simon Peyton Jones, Olin Shivers, Tim Sweeney The listed people are all luminaries of the functional programming world (and adjacent, like theorem proving and software verification), particularly Haskell. Hell, Simon Peyton Jones i…

At the same time… the language is interesting, and I’m sure it’s technically very well designed, but I’m not sure it’s a good fit for the task they’ve got. The apparent goal is for this to allow anybody to democratically contribute to Fortnite (a game most popular with a fairly young audience), but the language feels very technical and not-beginner-friendly to me. For example, it’s fairly symbol-heavy (making it intimidating and hard to read), uses inverted pascal case, and has some tricky semantic whitespace (it has indent-based comments!).

  Bar():int =
 if (Foo[]):
  1
 else:
  2

  Find(X:[]int, F(:int):void):int =
  for (Y:X, F(Y)):
   return Y
  false?

Re: Type system of Fortnite's Verse language

#6

Post by CharlesW » Wed, Mar 29, 2023, 11:00 PM UTC

AceJohnny2 wrote: post #3

AceJohnny2 wrote: post #2

Tangential, and because I had to look it up: > Verse has been designed by some people who really know what they’re doing: Lennart Augustsson, Joachim Breitner, Koen Claessen, Ranjit Jhala, Simon Peyton Jones, Olin Shivers, Tim Sweeney The listed people are all luminaries of the functional programming world (and adjacent, like theorem proving and software verification), particularly Haskell. Hell, Simon Peyton Jones i…

Nevertheless, I've yet to see an explanation of what problem Verse aims to solve that isn't solved by other languages out there. It's still very early (while announced last year, it was only just shown at GDC last week!) so I expect we'll be hearing a lot soon. Obviously, the association with Fortnite won't do it any favors. They claim they want

> Nevertheless, I've yet to see an explanation of what problem Verse aims to solve that isn't solved by other languages out there.

You might find the explanation in TFA helpful:

> "A battle royale lobby has just 100 players, which fit within a single compute shard.

> "But Fortnite is much more than just battle royale. A huge number of Fortnite players are on custom game modes made by people outside of Epic Games. It’s easy to imagine game modes having a few thousand players which can’t fit within a single shard. How do you scale to handle all that game state, correctly?

> "Software transactional memory is at the core of Verse. Computation is categorised by transactions and ability to rollback. The goal is to make it easy to write working software across multiple servers. A big goal; we don’t often see programmers do that successfully!"

Re: Type system of Fortnite's Verse language

#7

Post by AceJohnny2 » Wed, Mar 29, 2023, 11:02 PM UTC

CharlesW wrote: post #6

AceJohnny2 wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nevertheless, I've yet to see an explanation of what problem Verse aims to solve that isn't solved by other languages out there. It's still very early (while announced last year, it was only just shown at GDC last week!) so I expect we'll be hearing a lot soon. Obviously, the association with Fortnite won't do it any favors. They claim they want

> Nevertheless, I've yet to see an explanation of what problem Verse aims to solve that isn't solved by other languages out there. You might find the explanation in TFA helpful: > "A battle royale lobby has just 100 players, which fit within a single compute shard. > "But Fortnite is much more than just battle royale. A huge number of Fortnite players are on custom game modes made by people outside of Epic Games. It’…

I'm hearing "Haskell mashed with Erlang"

Re: Type system of Fortnite's Verse language

#8

Post by chinaman425 » Wed, Mar 29, 2023, 11:03 PM UTC

[dead]

Re: Type system of Fortnite's Verse language

#9

Post by illiarian » Wed, Mar 29, 2023, 11:03 PM UTC

CharlesW wrote: post #6

AceJohnny2 wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nevertheless, I've yet to see an explanation of what problem Verse aims to solve that isn't solved by other languages out there. It's still very early (while announced last year, it was only just shown at GDC last week!) so I expect we'll be hearing a lot soon. Obviously, the association with Fortnite won't do it any favors. They claim they want

> Nevertheless, I've yet to see an explanation of what problem Verse aims to solve that isn't solved by other languages out there. You might find the explanation in TFA helpful: > "A battle royale lobby has just 100 players, which fit within a single compute shard. > "But Fortnite is much more than just battle royale. A huge number of Fortnite players are on custom game modes made by people outside of Epic Games. It’…

STM isn't a new concept. How does it relate to "writing software across servers"?

Re: Type system of Fortnite's Verse language

#10

Post by chinaman425 » Wed, Mar 29, 2023, 11:04 PM UTC

illiarian wrote: post #4

AceJohnny2 wrote: post #2

Tangential, and because I had to look it up: > Verse has been designed by some people who really know what they’re doing: Lennart Augustsson, Joachim Breitner, Koen Claessen, Ranjit Jhala, Simon Peyton Jones, Olin Shivers, Tim Sweeney The listed people are all luminaries of the functional programming world (and adjacent, like theorem proving and software verification), particularly Haskell. Hell, Simon Peyton Jones i…

Or they might be just creating a Yet Another Language precisely because they are luminaries of functional programming. Those often tend to chase a yet another unattainable dream of "the one true functional language". When you type the words "the really know what they are doing" when talking about a language for game programming , I would expect people who know about game programming first, and about language design s…

[dead]