A Taste of Verse
For the last four years I have been working for Tim Sweeney at Epic Games on a new programming language called Verse. Like Haskell, it is a declarative language: a variable denotes an immutable value, not a mutable cell. But Verse is unusual and mind-expanding in many ways. It unifies things that are completely distinct in Haskell; expressions, patterns, and types are all the same thing. (For example, the 'array' type constructor and the 'map' function for arrays are the same thing, not just related things.) It includes features from functional logic programming. Choice and arrays have an elegant duality. Function overloading works in a new way. And so on.
In this talk I'll give you a flavour of what Verse is like and why I am finding it so fascinating.
I’m an Engineering Fellow at Epic Games. Prior to that I was a researcher at Microsoft Research Cambridge (1998-2022), and a professor at Glasgow University (1990-1998). I’m a Fellow of the Royal Society, an Honorary Professor of at Glasgow, and an Honorary Distinguished Fellow of the Cambridge University Department of Computer Science and Technology.
I’m interested in the design, implementation, and application of lazy functional languages. In practical terms, that means I spend most of my time on the design and implementation of the language Haskell. In particular, much of my work is focused around the Glasgow Haskell Compiler, and its ramifications.