Beyond functional programming: a taste of Verse. Simon Peyton Jones & Tim Sweeney | Lambda Days 2023

Simon Peyton Jones (of Haskell) is working on Verse, a functional relational programming language, that merges the ideas of both functional and logical programming into one. It’s being done to facilitate Fortnite metaverse, as he’s doing this work at Epic. ▶ this video

That must of course be "Haskell is useless" link But apart from that, his enthusiasm can even make the mseemingly most boring topic interesting. I'd personally start either at "the story of Haskell" Escape from the Ivory Tower link Or something more recent, about Epic's Verse ▶ this video

The topic of programming languages in game development, and realtime interactive environments is such an unsolved issue that needs a lot of attention. There are huge problems eg with both the Unity C# approach as well as Unreal C++. The swift approach is very interesting indeed, and Miguel de Icaza as the author gives additional reason to follow this effort. Additionally the Verse project from Unreal is extremely interesting imo, and has much wider scope/implications. ▶ this video

> Given that this F# feature enables parallel analysis, wouldn't it make sense to do all of our development in a Lisp-like Trie structure where the types are simply part of the program itself, like in Idris2? Yeah, maybe, you for sure could, but in the context of F# as it exists, it may be hard to get from here to there. > 'm afraid I don't even understand what the difference between code, data, and types are anymore... it used to make sense, but these new languages have dissolved those boundaries in my mind, and I am not sure how to build it back up again. Yeah, good luck with that. I think maybe taking a mental step away from programing might help. It's true that human interpretation of the world often has these properties. And he generalization of the systems in no way invalidate the usefulness of the categorization system. Maybe it's helpfulnto consider the properties of your classes. To risk your further descent into madness. I recommend the Lambda days talk on the Verse programming language [1]. Which has further contemplation on the topics you are thinking about. With an eye towards practicality. [1]: ▶ this video