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The Verse Programming Language [pdf]

simon.peytonjones.org

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Re: The Verse Programming Language [pdf]

#261

Post by epolanski »

auggierose wrote: post #256
bmitc wrote: post #218

These slides need a lot of work. I'll read the paper later, but the slides really lack context and motivation. * I'm a little disheartened to see "Objectively: no. All languages are Turing-complete" in the context of the question of needing another language. It's a throw away comment and largely irrelevant when considering the actual use of programming languages. If one has to state this platitude, it is more accurat…

> These are professors and language experts, so I'm a bit surprised by the presentation. I am not surprised by this at all. If they really want to create something practical, I would rather employ the creator of Turbo Pascal, than one of the creators of Haskell. To me it seems as SPJ et al. are taking the money to do something fun and interesting, and scratching an itch they had for some time. Nothing wrong with that…

Labeling someone who's had an immense impact on making strict static functional programming mainstream and relevant in the industry as unfit to developing such a language seems quite out of place.

SPJ has been implementing features that the industry and real world users wanted in Haskell for decades and yet you expect his cooperation with another great dev and business person like Sweeney to be fooling around and not produce "anything useful anytime soon"?

I recommend you reading the transcript of one of the latest SPJ's podcasts, he speaks both about the role of languages in the real world and about Sweeney's project:

https://haskell.foundation/podcast/11/

Re: The Verse Programming Language [pdf]

#262

Post by cottenio »

I think mathematicians are going to love Verse.

I'm concerned about hoping "millions" of Metaverse devs will use Verse when, right now, the biggest problems with Metaverse are more about frameworks/netcode than the underlying language.

An open framework for handling interpolation, client & server space simulation (w/ physics), forecasting/prediction for events, and handling at least 30 ticks/s for a connection target with I'm not at all certain we need a new language to do that.

I know it's hard to compare the usage percentage of various programming paradigms because many languages are multi-paradigm, but FP represents a much smaller piece of the pie (especially in games/networking) and, honestly, we have several generations of existing engineers who don't do FP.

Still, it's nice to see that Sweeney hasn't given up on making FP more useful to the mainstream! =)

Re: The Verse Programming Language [pdf]

#264

Post by epolanski »

bmitc wrote: post #220
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…

> Perhaps Verse will one day be as influential for PL design as Haskell has been. Has Haskell really been that influential though? It seems to me that MLs, Lisps, Schemes, and even Erlang have been more influential.

It's definitely the most influential of the statically typed functional languages. All other statically typed functional languages or libraries inherit a lot from Haskell implementations, type system and type class concepts.

Re: The Verse Programming Language [pdf]

#265

Post by nullifidian »

bmitc wrote: post #220
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…

> Perhaps Verse will one day be as influential for PL design as Haskell has been. Has Haskell really been that influential though? It seems to me that MLs, Lisps, Schemes, and even Erlang have been more influential.

The first language to implement type classes. The first language to structure computation with monads, which are now omnipresent in functional languages.

Re: The Verse Programming Language [pdf]

#266

Post by nullifidian »

epolanski wrote: post #264
bmitc wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Perhaps Verse will one day be as influential for PL design as Haskell has been. Has Haskell really been that influential though? It seems to me that MLs, Lisps, Schemes, and even Erlang have been more influential.

It's definitely the most influential of the statically typed functional languages. All other statically typed functional languages or libraries inherit a lot from Haskell implementations, type system and type class concepts.

Standard ML is more influential because it's the foundational statically typed functional language. But Haskell has gained more popularity with the general programming public, not just academics.

Re: The Verse Programming Language [pdf]

#267

Post by danpalmer »

bmitc wrote: post #218

These slides need a lot of work. I'll read the paper later, but the slides really lack context and motivation. * I'm a little disheartened to see "Objectively: no. All languages are Turing-complete" in the context of the question of needing another language. It's a throw away comment and largely irrelevant when considering the actual use of programming languages. If one has to state this platitude, it is more accurat…

> These slides need a lot of work. I'll read the paper later, but the slides really lack context and motivation.

SPJ is an exceptional public speaker, but that involves a lot of talking, a lot of context, audience participation, and a lot of wild gesticulating at slides.

I'm not sure if this talk was recorded, but I am sure if it was the recording will be much better than the slides, the slides are not really designed for consumption outside of the talk context, but rather as a reminder rather than taking notes. At least that's my experience having seen a number of his talks over the years.

Re: The Verse Programming Language [pdf]

#268

Post by benji-york »

qayxc wrote: post #77
benji-york wrote: post #17

I'm sure they know a lot more about language design than I do, but the use of what is essentially SQL's NULL for boolean false doesn't feel like a good idea at first blush.

I didn't understand "false?" as a NULL value but more of a "Nothing"/"None" in the context of a Maybe monad. Since the language doesn't even have a Boolean equivalent, it makes sense to introduce a value for a failed condition or zero values. The problem with SQL's NULL are its properties (comparison and arithmetic in particular), which doesn't seem to apply here (e.g. "42 + false? === false?, just as with monadic fu…

I don't quite follow the second paragraph. You say

> The problem with SQL's NULL are its properties (comparison and arithmetic in particular) [...]

Which I follow, then you say that those unfortunate properties don't apply and give a counterexample (I think it is intended as a counterexample) of

> 42 + false? === false?

But that seems to be the same as SQL's NULL:

    benji=# \pset null NULL
    Null display is "NULL".
    benji=# select 1 + NULL;
    ?column?
    ----------
        NULL
    (1 row)
Which leaves me confused.

Re: The Verse Programming Language [pdf]

#269

Post by Danieru »

chombier wrote: post #187
Smaug123 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's just because SPJ likes it. He uses it for presentations a lot.

> This is a very funny question, "Why use Comic Sans?" So, all my talks use Comic Sans and I frequently see remarks like 'Simon Peyton-Jones, great talk about Haskell but why did he use Comic Sans?' but nobody's ever been able to tell me what is wrong with it. It's a nice legible font, I like it. So until somebody explains to me ... Ah, I understand that it's meant to be a bit naff, but I don't care about naff stuff,…

Pure and brilliant counter signaling. His paper is worth reading and he knows it, the font is not there to entice readers. The paper does the enticing. The comics sans signals "This is either the ramblings of a child, or the utterance of genius, and I'm all out of childhood..."

Re: The Verse Programming Language [pdf]

#270

Post by auggierose »

epolanski wrote: post #261
auggierose wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> These are professors and language experts, so I'm a bit surprised by the presentation. I am not surprised by this at all. If they really want to create something practical, I would rather employ the creator of Turbo Pascal, than one of the creators of Haskell. To me it seems as SPJ et al. are taking the money to do something fun and interesting, and scratching an itch they had for some time. Nothing wrong with that…

Labeling someone who's had an immense impact on making strict static functional programming mainstream and relevant in the industry as unfit to developing such a language seems quite out of place. SPJ has been implementing features that the industry and real world users wanted in Haskell for decades and yet you expect his cooperation with another great dev and business person like Sweeney to be fooling around and not…

We can revisit your comment in 10 years, and I'll be happy to have been wrong. Undoubtedly there will be interesting research arising out of this. Let's see how many people will be programming in Verse by then.
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