Beyond Functional Programming: The Verse Programming Language (Simon Peyton Jones)

Since joining Epic Games in late 2021, I have been involved in the design and development of Verse, a new, declarative programming language that Epic plans to use as the language of the metaverse. Verse is a functional logic language, with a bunch of innovative ideas. Like Haskell Verse is declarative (a variable in Verse stands for just one, immutable value), and higher order (lambdas are first class). But Verse goes well beyond Haskell, with existential variables, unification, expressions that yield multiple values, and more besides. In this talk I’ll give you a sense of what functional logic programming is about, what it looks like to program in Verse, and how we can give meaning to Verse programs using rewrite rules.