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I didn’t find the metaverse stuff to be a compelling motivation for the programming language features described. It felt to me more like ‘I had some ideas about

I didn’t find the metaverse stuff to be a compelling motivation for the programming language features described. It felt to me more like ‘I had some ideas about programming languages after 20+ years of Haskell and research. Here’s my plan to unify logic programming with more normal functional programming (also we’re getting rid of monads). By the way my boss cares about the metaverse.’ But maybe that is too cynical. The metaverse things used to motivate this language don’t seem new to me either. Aren’t they basically ‘works well with concurrency’ and ‘somehow the language that finally makes it easy for different programs written by different people to talk to each other’ which don’t seem to be new goals in programming language design as far as I’m aware. But maybe I’m being uncharitable in my interpretation. I’ve not looked at the associated paper or tried to understand what the metaverse is so maybe things are better discussed there. Or maybe they are glossed over because the presentation was for PLT people rather than metaverse people and I think many of the former would be turned off by a talk about the metaverse. This doesn’t strike me as a very serious attempt to predict the future and design a programming language based on that prediction (though few such attempts exist for the design of most things in tech, and they needn’t correspond to success). It seems more like taking a punt and exploring a new point in the programming language design space that may be relevant. I think it is interesting to look at what happened with Fortress for comparison: - Well known PLT person (Guy Steele of scheme, CL, Java fame) in a reasonably funded industrial research lab - they started with ideas about where computers were going around 20 years ago. So high core counts, big memory vs cpu frequency divergence, NUMA/HPC architectures. And an increasingly difficult amount of legacy Fortran code - developed an idea for a language that would be easier to write parallel scientific programs in - eg functional, map-reduce paradigm - added in some known features like typeclasses (monads for map reduce) - some other random features/ideas - wrote a bunch of papers - not that much actually came of it, I think Maybe they weren’t good at executing on making a language people wanted, or maybe that was never the goal. Or maybe they were too early – a lot of the ideas became more important with gpu compute but most people still write those programs at a much lower level.

cmrdporcupine 4y ago
I followed Fortress eagerly at the time. I'd say if you want to see what eventually came of it, look at Julia. It's a pretty clear descendant.
- dan-robertson 4y ago
  I think one must squint a lot to see Julia as a fortress descendant. They seem much more like siblings trying to solve similar problems. Like fortress, Julia does have a reasonable amount of CL/Dylan ancestry with multimethods, etc, but didn’t try any of the fortress style efforts around typeclasses and writing varied code that magically parallelises – you can still get good perf doing typical vectorised stuff like numpy/APL/R, and you get decent perf in loops etc due to the jit and aggressive monomorphisation, and there is fancy stuff for clusters or gpu arrays, but it doesn’t try to achieve the things fortress wanted like making it easy to write code that can be more magically parallelised.
  - cmrdporcupine 4y ago
    I think in the constellation of languages there's still more intersection of "feature dots" between the two than there is disjunction. Multimethods & numerics emphasis alone makes them uniquely similar, as the latter especially is not a feature that has been mined well in other languages. Some of the influence is quite conscious, too, from my reading. Though as you mention is obviously a lot of common influence from Dylan and Common Lisp. And here's a talk by Guy Steele about the Fortress experience, at JuliaCon: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EZD3Scuv02g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EZD3Scuv02g
WillPostForFood 4y ago
This doesn’t strike me as a very serious attempt to predict the future and design a programming language based on that prediction I don't think it is trying to predict, it is purpose built to be the Unreal engine scripting language. I hate the word metaverse, but it will be a highly relevant, important language to online multiplayer worlds as soon as it is released (as soon as a month from now).
- dan-robertson 4y ago
  The implication of the argument that the above comment was responding to was that the design of the language was driven by predictions for what the metaverse would be like and what that would imply about the needs of a programming language. I agree that the OP doesn’t seem to really try to predict that. I’m sceptical that a language like this will catch on in Unreal but maybe if that is the motivating use-case it will drive some interesting and practical language features. Will have to wait and see.
Twisol 4y ago
> It felt to me more like ‘I had some ideas about programming languages after 20+ years of Haskell and research. Here’s my plan to unify logic programming with more normal functional programming (also we’re getting rid of monads). By the way my boss cares about the metaverse.’ But maybe that is too cynical. For what it's worth, Tim Sweeney (the "boss" in this story) has been thinking about Verse or something like it since at least 2006: https://www.st.cs.uni-saarland.de/edu/seminare/2005/advanced-fp/docs/sweeny.pdf https://www.st.cs.uni-saarland.de/edu/seminare/2005/advanced... It seems much less like SPJ getting funding from a big-bucks metaverse boss, and much more like Tim Sweeney getting together a dream team to make his dream language in one form or another.
travisjungroth 4y ago
I underestimated your disagreement with the metaverse motivation, taking it as "I don't get it" versus "I don't think that's true/right/good/worthwhile/honest/whatever". I wouldn't take your skepticism as uncharitable as much as realistic. If a company is trying to apply some abstract theory to solve a problem, they might hire a theoretician to work on it. They'll say "We are advancing X theory to solve Y problem for our customers". Well, the "we" in there is one dude and his motivation certainly isn't Y. He'd be working on X regardless. Y is just the reason he's getting paid. That's not exactly what's going on here, just sayin distorted motivations aren't that rare or even really that nefarious. On the not-newness, I think that's true, too. You can justify it by saying that a metaverse will have the same problems in different proportions. This would justify approaches with tradeoffs that wouldn't make sense in other situations. It looks like it's optimizing for a system with high concurrency, weak coordination and on one platform. So like Erlang at Ericsson but more programmers, or like the internet but less independent. Thank you for sharing the Fortress example!

cmrdporcupine 4y ago

I followed Fortress eagerly at the time. I'd say if you want to see what eventually came of it, look at Julia. It's a pretty clear descendant.

dan-robertson 4y ago
I think one must squint a lot to see Julia as a fortress descendant. They seem much more like siblings trying to solve similar problems. Like fortress, Julia does have a reasonable amount of CL/Dylan ancestry with multimethods, etc, but didn’t try any of the fortress style efforts around typeclasses and writing varied code that magically parallelises – you can still get good perf doing typical vectorised stuff like numpy/APL/R, and you get decent perf in loops etc due to the jit and aggressive monomorphisation, and there is fancy stuff for clusters or gpu arrays, but it doesn’t try to achieve the things fortress wanted like making it easy to write code that can be more magically parallelised.
- cmrdporcupine 4y ago
  I think in the constellation of languages there's still more intersection of "feature dots" between the two than there is disjunction. Multimethods & numerics emphasis alone makes them uniquely similar, as the latter especially is not a feature that has been mined well in other languages. Some of the influence is quite conscious, too, from my reading. Though as you mention is obviously a lot of common influence from Dylan and Common Lisp. And here's a talk by Guy Steele about the Fortress experience, at JuliaCon: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EZD3Scuv02g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EZD3Scuv02g

WillPostForFood 4y ago

This doesn’t strike me as a very serious attempt to predict the future and design a programming language based on that prediction I don't think it is trying to predict, it is purpose built to be the Unreal engine scripting language. I hate the word metaverse, but it will be a highly relevant, important language to online multiplayer worlds as soon as it is released (as soon as a month from now).

dan-robertson 4y ago
The implication of the argument that the above comment was responding to was that the design of the language was driven by predictions for what the metaverse would be like and what that would imply about the needs of a programming language. I agree that the OP doesn’t seem to really try to predict that. I’m sceptical that a language like this will catch on in Unreal but maybe if that is the motivating use-case it will drive some interesting and practical language features. Will have to wait and see.

Twisol 4y ago

> It felt to me more like ‘I had some ideas about programming languages after 20+ years of Haskell and research. Here’s my plan to unify logic programming with more normal functional programming (also we’re getting rid of monads). By the way my boss cares about the metaverse.’ But maybe that is too cynical. For what it's worth, Tim Sweeney (the "boss" in this story) has been thinking about Verse or something like it since at least 2006: https://www.st.cs.uni-saarland.de/edu/seminare/2005/advanced-fp/docs/sweeny.pdf https://www.st.cs.uni-saarland.de/edu/seminare/2005/advanced... It seems much less like SPJ getting funding from a big-bucks metaverse boss, and much more like Tim Sweeney getting together a dream team to make his dream language in one form or another.

travisjungroth 4y ago

I underestimated your disagreement with the metaverse motivation, taking it as "I don't get it" versus "I don't think that's true/right/good/worthwhile/honest/whatever". I wouldn't take your skepticism as uncharitable as much as realistic. If a company is trying to apply some abstract theory to solve a problem, they might hire a theoretician to work on it. They'll say "We are advancing X theory to solve Y problem for our customers". Well, the "we" in there is one dude and his motivation certainly isn't Y. He'd be working on X regardless. Y is just the reason he's getting paid. That's not exactly what's going on here, just sayin distorted motivations aren't that rare or even really that nefarious. On the not-newness, I think that's true, too. You can justify it by saying that a metaverse will have the same problems in different proportions. This would justify approaches with tradeoffs that wouldn't make sense in other situations. It looks like it's optimizing for a system with high concurrency, weak coordination and on one platform. So like Erlang at Ericsson but more programmers, or like the internet but less independent. Thank you for sharing the Fortress example!