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. They claim they want
You might find the explanation in TFA helpful:
> "A battle royale lobby has just 100 players, which fit within a single compute shard.
> "But Fortnite is much more than just battle royale. A huge number of Fortnite players are on custom game modes made by people outside of Epic Games. It’s easy to imagine game modes having a few thousand players which can’t fit within a single shard. How do you scale to handle all that game state, correctly?
> "Software transactional memory is at the core of Verse. Computation is categorised by transactions and ability to rollback. The goal is to make it easy to write working software across multiple servers. A big goal; we don’t often see programmers do that successfully!"
SPJ spoke with disappointment about his lack of impact on Microsoft's products. Excel did end up adopting lambdas but that took a decade and a half. Inside Epic, he can roll out functional programming to a young audience that hasn't done much programming before.
And from what I can infer, Microsoft Research seems to be paying quite well. Do you have knowledge that indicates otherwise?
I mean he had lots of options, so the pitch from Epic must have still been pretty good.
On the other hand you have Erlang thesis from 1980s which is still true: https://erlang.org/download/armstrong_thesis_2003.pdf (updated in 2003)
The major problem being solved is that Fortnite did not fully control the fate of any other language.
What do you mean? I can't think of a better way to fast track a language to mass adoption.