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Type system of Fortnite's Verse language

brianmckenna.org

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Re: Type system of Fortnite's Verse language

#11

Post by CharlesW »

542458 wrote: post #5
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 int…

> The apparent goal is for this to be a “now everybody can contribute to Fortnite, democratize content” thing…

I don't think so. TFA notes that Verse was created to support a non-trivial use case, which is to make it possible to write software that works across multiple servers in order to support thousands of simultaneous players.

Re: Type system of Fortnite's Verse language

#12

Post by jeron »

542458 wrote: post #5
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 int…

+1 to this. If anything, you have a language that looks like it was made by luminaries, for luminaries. If you want something that would get kids that wanted to get into programming to create custom Fortnite modes, you want something that looks closer to Scratch or Python. I want to say Roblox has made programming quite accessible to children iirc

Re: Type system of Fortnite's Verse language

#14

Post by AceJohnny2 »

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…

Sure, but my point was that some such YALs are just overgrown DSLs (cough UnrealScript) that find themselves facing the same kind of design problems that have been solved decades before by more forward-thinkers. In this case, these are good designers with decades of deep experience, and who I expect to have solved many design issues already.

Re: Type system of Fortnite's Verse language

#16

Post by ABeeSea »

AceJohnny2 wrote: post #7
CharlesW wrote: post #6

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. 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"

The pitch for SPJ to leave MS research on Haskell for a video game company must have been pretty compelling so I’m very interested to see how this evolves.

Re: Type system of Fortnite's Verse language

#17

Post by 542458 »

CharlesW wrote: post #11
542458 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 int…

> The apparent goal is for this to be a “now everybody can contribute to Fortnite, democratize content” thing… I don't think so. TFA notes that Verse was created to support a non-trivial use case, which is to make it possible to write software that works across multiple servers in order to support thousands of simultaneous players.

Epic’s very first design goal for Verse is “simple enough to learn as a first-time programmer”, and all of their intro docs are framed around making content for Fortnite.

https://dev.epicgames.com/documentation/en-us/uefn/verse-lan...

AFAIK at present time there’s no way of even using Verse outside of Fortnite mods.

It certainly seems that it’s best suited for the use case you described, but their site is trying to sell it as a “let’s all learn programming and mod Fortnite” thing.

Re: Type system of Fortnite's Verse language

#18

Post by robopsychology »

jeron wrote: post #12
542458 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 int…

+1 to this. If anything, you have a language that looks like it was made by luminaries, for luminaries. If you want something that would get kids that wanted to get into programming to create custom Fortnite modes, you want something that looks closer to Scratch or Python. I want to say Roblox has made programming quite accessible to children iirc

Having worked with a team building new programming languages and consisting of Haskell creators, I can confirm this was a near-fatal issue in those projects too.

Re: Type system of Fortnite's Verse language

#19

Post by srgpqt »

illiarian wrote: post #9
CharlesW wrote: post #6

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. 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"?

STM is the Haskell people’s hammer solution to everyone else’s nail problems.
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