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The Verse Programming Language [pdf]

simon.peytonjones.org

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Re: The Verse Programming Language [pdf]

#101

Post by eyelidlessness »

dhdgrygev wrote: post #92
jasonhansel wrote: post #64

No offense, but: does this actually relate the metaverse, or was that part added in so Epic Games would fund it? I don't see any first-class features that would be specific to that use case.

It doesn't. This presentation contains absolutely nothing of value for a real programmer trying to actually make stuff. Hopefully we'll get more useful info soon, once it can be used in Fortnite.

> This presentation contains absolutely nothing of value for a real programmer trying to actually make stuff.

Speak for yourself! I got a lot from it that feels immediately practical for my current projects as well as others I want to take on, and it makes logic programming concepts and benefits much more accessible to me than any amount of Prolog literature has so far (granted I came in wanting to be compelled).

Re: The Verse Programming Language [pdf]

#103

Post by Throwaway23459 »

bibanez wrote: post #74
tinco wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

My lecturer in second year, > 20 years ago mind, said we are learning C, because C++ is C with an ugly object oriented graft on top.

Re: The Verse Programming Language [pdf]

#104

Post by ww520 »

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.

It's the cartesian product. Think of it as a table with x labeling the top (x-axis) and y labeling the left side (y-axis). The cells of the table are the result of the product.

     x   1      2
  y |--------------
  7 |  (1,7)  (2,7)
  8 |  (1,8)  (2,8)

Re: The Verse Programming Language [pdf]

#105

Post by dhdgrygev »

eyelidlessness wrote: post #101
dhdgrygev wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't. This presentation contains absolutely nothing of value for a real programmer trying to actually make stuff. Hopefully we'll get more useful info soon, once it can be used in Fortnite.

> This presentation contains absolutely nothing of value for a real programmer trying to actually make stuff. Speak for yourself! I got a lot from it that feels immediately practical for my current projects as well as others I want to take on, and it makes logic programming concepts and benefits much more accessible to me than any amount of Prolog literature has so far (granted I came in wanting to be compelled).

Do you have some examples of things in here that you think will help you solve current problems?

I'm approaching it from the angle that I don't see how functional programming is at all useful for the kind of gameplay programming that would be done in a "metaverse" or is done in Unreal Engine today. So "it can do functional programming stuff" by itself doesn't cause any excitement. Rather the opposite. There are zero code examples of using it for anything besides abstract math. It executing code out of order seems to serve no purpose besides letting people create undecipherable monstrosities with it.

I'd maybe sum up this presentation as "we took functional programming and tried to make it less unusable by letting you actually mutate state" but I'm still lacking the original motivation of why I'd want to use that in the first place.

Re: The Verse Programming Language [pdf]

#106

Post by Silhouette »

tinco wrote: post #83
sicp-enjoyer wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 90% of C++'s useless standard library, The Python library is even larger and doesn't seem to be a barrier. If you know `std::vector`, ` > C++ would also not have been deprecated by Rust. That's an overstatement, to say the least.

In Python the standard library is fairly easily traversed and understood and if there's a better way of doing something it's usually linked I think. In C++ we have.. this.. https://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/algorithm/transform_reduce

Python's standard library includes many modules for specialised applications and yet it's surprisingly lacking in fundamental data structures and algorithms. Personally I think that's the wrong way round. Simple things like building dicts from different data structures or working with optional values that can be something or None just aren't there and you always seem to end up with some kind of utils.py full of hand-written functions to do these things that everyone writes again every time when they would have been either built into the syntax or a one-liner using the standard library in some other languages.

I agree that the C++ example is (one reason) why modern C++ has jumped the shark.

Re: The Verse Programming Language [pdf]

#107

Post by charcircuit »

ParetoOptimal wrote: post #100
st3fan wrote: post #48

This looks like a language designed for language designers and not for language users.

Wouldn't a language designed for current language users not bring much new to the table and mostly focus on familiarity and interop with existing la.guages?

When you want to make a mainstream language you will have better luck by focusing on bringing value to the users of the language over focusing on creating something novel.

Re: The Verse Programming Language [pdf]

#108

Post by agumonkey »

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…

Surprised about the syntax. Curlies still hold a lot of power :)

Re: The Verse Programming Language [pdf]

#109

Post by ww520 »

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 guess it's because metaverse funds it? So it has to tie to metaverse in some angle.

Re: The Verse Programming Language [pdf]

#110

Post by eyelidlessness »

baby wrote: post #91
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…

+1 to this I remember struggling to understand the x = 7 syntax for storing a value in x. My young self was like “so if x is equal to 7, how come we can write x is equal to 8 later? That doesn’t make sense”

A cool thing about this in Erlang (which I think is the same in Prolog) is that the = operator works almost exactly how you would have expected: it binds the value but then it asserts the binding’s equality. So once you’ve established x = 7, x = 8 is actually an error! Because you’re right, it doesn’t make sense that at one point x = 7 and later the same x = 8!
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