[HN Gopher] Type system of Fortnite's Verse language
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       Type system of Fortnite's Verse language
        
       Author : ghuntley
       Score  : 20 points
       Date   : 2023-03-29 21:29 UTC (1 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (brianmckenna.org)
 (TXT) w3m dump (brianmckenna.org)
        
       | AceJohnny2 wrote:
       | Tangential, and because I had to look it up:
       | 
       | > _Verse has been designed by some people who really know what
       | they're doing: Lennart Augustsson, Joachim Breitner, Koen
       | Claessen, Ranjit Jhala, Simon Peyton Jones, Olin Shivers, Tim
       | Sweeney_
       | 
       | The listed people are all luminaries of the functional
       | programming world (and adjacent, like theorem proving and
       | software verification), particularly Haskell. Hell, Simon Peyton
       | Jones is one of the _creators_ of Haskell.
       | 
       | My point is, the creators of Verse aren't just a bunch of coders
       | (pejorative) who felt like creating Yet Another Language.
        
         | AceJohnny2 wrote:
         | Nevertheless, I've yet to see an explanation of what problem
         | Verse aims to solve that isn't solved by other languages out
         | there.
         | 
         | It's still very early (while announced last year, it was only
         | just shown at GDC last week!) so I expect we'll be hearing a
         | lot soon.
         | 
         | Obviously, the association with Fortnite won't do it any
         | favors.
        
         | illiarian wrote:
         | Or they might be just creating a Yet Another Language precisely
         | because they are luminaries of functional programming. Those
         | often tend to chase a yet another unattainable dream of "the
         | one true functional language".
         | 
         | When you type the words "the really know what they are doing"
         | when talking about a language for _game programming_ , I would
         | expect people who know about game programming first, and about
         | language design second.
         | 
         | There's a reason C/C++ and even C# are the go to languages for
         | game programming, and not Haskell.
         | 
         | For example, the only presentation we've seen so far literally
         | talks about Yet Another Language without mentioning a single
         | problem it solves for game programming.
        
         | 542458 wrote:
         | At the same time... the language is _interesting_ , and I'm
         | sure it's technically very well designed, but I'm not sure it's
         | a good fit for the task they've got. The apparent goal is for
         | this to be a "now everybody can contribute to Fortnite,
         | democratize content" thing, but the language feels very not-
         | beginner-friendly to me. For example, it's fairly symbol-heavy
         | (making it intimidating and hard to read), and has some tricky
         | semantic whitespace.
        
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       (page generated 2023-03-29 23:00 UTC)