This looks like a language designed for language designers and not for language users.
This is sadly the problem with most new languages.
The Verse Programming Language [pdf]
61–70 of 387 posts
Re: The Verse Programming Language [pdf]
#62This looks like Erlang for game design.
I’ve done some game programming software and a large number of their decisions make sense in that environment. In particular, expression evaluation and a lack of booleans.
Re: The Verse Programming Language [pdf]
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
See slides 2 and 4. He has an idea of what a metaverse would look like and the technical challenges that will bring up. The language is meant to help solve them.
Thanks. I re-read them but the metaverse angle still doesn’t make much sense to me. I don’t think that’s super relevant to the PLT stuff though.
I think it makes more sense if you don't think of it as an angle but a motivation. We've all been attacked with stuff like "shopping lists but on the blockchain!" for so long. This isn't like that. It's that they're foreseeing a technical problem of a shitload of concurrency and extra pain of API changes (metaverse) and this is meant to help.
Re: The Verse Programming Language [pdf]
#64No 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.
Re: The Verse Programming Language [pdf]
#65I'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.
> 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 strictly from left to right and 2) an expression evaluates to a sequence of zero or more values immediately makes sense of the example.
Unfortunately it's incredibly hard to "reset" your mind into a state that doesn't know about variable assignments and thinking of variables as singular slots as is the case in Haskell and most other programming languages.
That's why "intuition" is a very subjective thing - your intuition changes with knowledge and experience and both are hard to suppress.
Re: The Verse Programming Language [pdf]
#66> Like the metaverse vision, Verse itself is open Aren't these companies pursuing a "metaverse" product because they can lock it down, control it and make money on it? Otherwise rather than FB and Epic etc making their own, you'd have something developers could work with and use right now I wonder if maybe Simon Peyton-Jones has to play along with the whole metaverse fad just to do something he wants to do.
The strategy is more about getting a first mover's advantage. Companies believe the metaverse is inevitable and they believe that it will become a big part of the everyday person's life. These companies want to be key players in this space. Look at the open ecosystem of the web and think about how much money ICANN and Verisign make from their DNS. Anyone can make their own independent DNS (see projects like namecoin)…
Oh I get it, but they're aiming for first-mover's advantage with the goal of being in control of something, not about implementing a lovely open ecosystem.
Re: The Verse Programming Language [pdf]
#67That's a wise move from Epic.
If we somehow happen to have a few competing metaverses, the one with the biggest developer mind share will likely come out ahead.
Just reading the PDF energized me about the possibilities.
Re: The Verse Programming Language [pdf]
#68This looks like Erlang for game design. I’ve done some game programming software and a large number of their decisions make sense in that environment. In particular, expression evaluation and a lack of booleans.
I have no experience with game programming. Why would you not want booleans when developing games?
Re: The Verse Programming Language [pdf]
#69I'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.
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…
> 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.
Re: The Verse Programming Language [pdf]
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
See slides 2 and 4. He has an idea of what a metaverse would look like and the technical challenges that will bring up. The language is meant to help solve them.
I'd think the real interesting stuff would have been the transactional parts and the effects system. Unfortunately, these slides don't describe them; they just mention that they exist.
The paper also stops before going into these. These were the bits that actually interested me, but alas, guess we'll have to wait for that.