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Comment by stevesimmons | Hacker News Reader

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stevesimmons·

This HN story on Verse 3 months ago has a detailed PDF slide presentation and 376 comments:

Beyond Functional Programming: The Verse Programming Language [pdf] (peytonjones.org)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33946933

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Thanks for this link, very helpful in understanding the Verse language!

Verse-as-a-scripting-language-for-a-game-engine is an interesting experiment. The million script writers who use it are not going to have any understanding of the functional language underpinnings. They're going to copy-and-paste until things work. There's going to be a lot of superstition and cargo cults.

I guess Tim Sweeney has a long history of successfully using exotic custom scripting languages in game engines, from ZZT to various generations of UnrealScript. So he probably knows what he's doing.

"There's going to be a lot of superstition and cargo cults." I'm willing to hedge my bets that an immutable functional language has a much higher tendency to remain legible than something else. But it will be a very interesting experiment in the history of computer languages IMO.

I also felt Tim was tempting fate when he said "You can import directly from a self published URL. Of course it's the responsibility of the publisher to never change the semantics of that code in an incompatible way."

I just can't imagine that working at scale. I bet they add semantic versioning support pretty quickly.

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