Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Type system of Fortnite's Verse language

brianmckenna.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 159 posts

Re: Type system of Fortnite's Verse language

#31

Post by lmm »

waboremo wrote: post #23
illiarian wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Why would Epic, owners of the primary reason why C++ is gravitated towards in game programming, spend time and money creating Yet Another Language just to satiate luminaries?

The cachet they gain from having those luminaries and keeping them satisfied might outweigh the costs.

Re: Type system of Fortnite's Verse language

#32

Post by soup10 »

jayd16 wrote: post #28
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. The major problem being solved is that Fortnite did not fully control the fate of any other language.

it's also well known that if you put a bunch of functional programmers in a room and let them marinate its only a matter of time before they make another functional programming language

Re: Type system of Fortnite's Verse language

#33

Post by whateveracct »

ABeeSea wrote: post #16
AceJohnny2 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

oh I'm $ure it wa$

Re: Type system of Fortnite's Verse language

#34

Post by nightski »

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…

I mean I was writing C++ in junior high and I am by no means that bright. Just persistent.

I think in some ways we have become too afraid of some upfront complexity at the expense of beginners in order for more well engineered systems. I think a slightly higher learning curve is not always a bad thing.

Re: Type system of Fortnite's Verse language

#35

Post by illiarian »

waboremo wrote: post #23
illiarian wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Why would Epic, owners of the primary reason why C++ is gravitated towards in game programming, spend time and money creating Yet Another Language just to satiate luminaries?

Hubris. "Look at us, we have these LANGUAGE EXPERTS working for us".

As a result the only presentations these people do are about how great their new Yet Another Language toy is.

Compare this to, say, Jonathan Blow talking about design decisions for his language: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uZgbKrDEzAs

Re: Type system of Fortnite's Verse language

#36

Post by waboremo »

542458 wrote: post #17
CharlesW wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 s…

Yes, but it's not an exclusive design goal. Other goals are listed on that page and you can see how design tradeoffs happened. You don't prioritize simplicity over all and make concurrency a core pillar!

And certainly I think they pulled it off. Go through the lessons here to see what I mean in nothing stands out as beginner unfriendly here, but it's also not black boxing much in the way Python would. https://dev.epicgames.com/documentation/en-us/uefn/learn-the...

Re: Type system of Fortnite's Verse language

#37

Post by munificent »

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…

> I would expect people who know about game programming first, and about language design second.

Well, one of the authors is Tim Sweeney.

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

It's interesting that you list those because none of them were originally designed for games. Well, C++ sort of was if you consider network simulations to be game-like.

I share your concern that this language looks like they packed a lot of functional programming candy in it and maybe not so much "actually reasonable for building a game" features.

But I think you're also underselling the expertise of the people involved. Also, my impression is that Verse is mostly intended as a game server language. I don't think you'll be writing physics or rendering in Verse. From that angle, a heavy focus on immutability, software transactions, etc. can make a lot of sense: it's trying to make it tractiable to author very large distributed systems with a lot of mutable state.

Re: Type system of Fortnite's Verse language

#38

Post by waboremo »

illiarian wrote: post #35
waboremo wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would Epic, owners of the primary reason why C++ is gravitated towards in game programming, spend time and money creating Yet Another Language just to satiate luminaries?

Hubris. "Look at us, we have these LANGUAGE EXPERTS working for us". As a result the only presentations these people do are about how great their new Yet Another Language toy is. Compare this to, say, Jonathan Blow talking about design decisions for his language: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uZgbKrDEzAs

I'm confused by this example, Jonathan Blow sounds identical to LANGUAGE EXPERTS here. If anything the difference stems from humor, but they're both doing the exact same thing - arguing Yet Another Language is better.

Re: Type system of Fortnite's Verse language

#39

Post by waboremo »

lmm wrote: post #31
waboremo wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would Epic, owners of the primary reason why C++ is gravitated towards in game programming, spend time and money creating Yet Another Language just to satiate luminaries?

The cachet they gain from having those luminaries and keeping them satisfied might outweigh the costs.

Generally speaking that's true. But I'm not entirely sure many luminaries would be satisfied being relegated to being the "Fortnite language". Surely they have larger goals here and it's why Epic is bothering when so much of their ecosystem relies on C++ currently.
Post reply on HN