[duckqlz]

Coming from the paper on Verse Calculus and having watched Simon Peytonjones’ talk last year I was super excited to try Verse in UEFN last week. Much to my dismay instead of a rich functional language I was met with something that looked like a DSL with python inspired syntax. As I played with the language I couldn’t stop thinking about “choice” and the other feature of verseMax I felt I was missing out on but after making a few toy maps I realized that epic had released a language entirely meant for the public. Reading Verse can be accomplished by anyone who can write a python for loop. The language is VERY accessible.

From the comments below I can see a lot of people are turned away by the idea of FP and this language was clearly meant to address those concerns. The type system is interesting from a high level view but for non-coders I can see how it would make sense.

For instance writing `if var = int` looks perfectly reasonable for someone who has never programmed before and it just works in verse.

So all in all while I was upset on a personal level at what Epic has released, I hope it is a stepping stone to their overall goal of verseMax. Furthermore I am excited at the idea of millions of people (kids) learning functional programming as their first language and think this iteration of verse may just be the perfect gateway drug.

[1] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=832JF1o7Ck8 [2] https://simon.peytonjones.org/assets/pdfs/verse-conf.pdf [3] https://dev.epicgames.com/documentation/en-us/uefn/verse-lan...

[HdS84]

I really like FP, but I think most FP language designers are a little too enamored with cryptic symbols and abbreviations. Tried f# but the abbreviations turned me off, e.g. seq instead of sequence.