So how's the Verse language and ecosystem turning out?
There was a big splash about this when it came out in 2023, with big names like Simon Peyton-Jones, Lennart Augustsson, and Guy Steele involved. But since then I've heard nothing. Apparently still Fortnite-only, not built into the Unreal Engine. I'm not wired into the gamedev world, is anything happening here?
I'm fascinated that Epic Games are the authors. Does anyone know what their motivation for this research would be?
The Verse programming language, at least a while back, reminds me a great deal of the Icon programming language, as well as jq, with pervasive backtracking and generators. Icon's authors referred to it as "a goal-oriented programming language".
Maybe I'm not understanding the insight here, but it sort of seams like having confluence defeats the purpose of logical semantics.
My specific concern is that by having logical semantics in a language you can represent non-deterministic ambiguous computations, but for this you need divergent paths which, if I understand correctly, the authors have removed from their language. So what's the point of doing this?
It's a nice write up but I'm not sure what the contribution is. I would have expected more engagement with Peter Van Roy's work, in particular his and Seif Haridi's epic book CTM [1] where the logic variable got properly unpacked more than 15 years previously. Or at least a citation.
Has anyone looked into how to decouple logic variables from backtracking? i.e., is there a good reason to unbind a variable apart from the Prolog discipline? (Without unbinding we get single-assignment variables where initialisation is decoupled from declaration, which I feel can often be simulated with laziness ala Haskell, but see CTM.)
[1] https://webperso.info.ucl.ac.be/~pvr/book.html