Beyond functional programming: a taste of Verse. Simon Peyton Jones & Tim Sweeney | Lambda Days 2023 

You can solve the halting problem for programs less than a K factor in size. Our computers actually don't have infinite amount of processing speed and memory, and our programmers only have a finite amount of brain power.

Well, yes ... but actually, in practice big theoretical barriers may turn out to be somewhat negotiable. To take a classic example, the unification algorithm used for type inference and checking in Standard ML is exponential - NP-Hard or worse iirc: so compiling an ML codebase beyond a very restricted size should be impossible, shouldn't it? ...Or (demonstrably) not! As the authors of one notable early paper on the subject put it: "Our worst-case lower bounds stand in contrast to practical experience, which suggests that commonly used algorithms for type reconstruction do not slow compilation substantially." In practice, if your compiler's type inference algorithm (or, in this case, its partial program verifier) cannot process your code within a reasonable time (as determined primarily by your patience and expectations), then you just hit Ctrl-C and examine whether you can give it some extra hints (or perhaps restructure your code a little) to make its task easier. In the case of ML, this happens rather rarely (although it's quite easy to create pathological code if that is your deliberate aim). Will such a fortuitously benign state of affairs be achievable for Verse's functional + logic hybrid? That will depend partly on engineering, partly on some of the fundamental choices made in the design of the language (and perhaps a small dose of luck); it wouldn't be too surprising to find the fullest expression of MaxVerse containing features that can/will never be implemented but somehow anchor the cohesion of the implementable fragments of the language. SPJ seems to think that it could work, and his previous hunches about such things have certainly often been on the money ... 😇

@@aoeu256 Solve the halting problem for the busy beaver algorithm for , say n=5. I'm sure we'll know when it'll halt after a few billion years.

@@aoeu256 You can run a loop for every atom in the universe, technically.

Tim obviously meant that with proper constraints you can solve it. You just can't in the general case.

In Python you can assign types to a variable, just to note that this specific feature has been implemented before.

doh! you misheard or misunderstood. it's called _functional _*_logic_* programming: a superset of function programming & with aspects of logic programming.

When you break 1 billion you choose the font you want

SPJ always uses comic sans.

In fairness Tim made him isolate it into a separate slide-pack that he had to alt-tab to.

SPJ is an exulted being and can use whatever font he wishes.

its not cyrillic and thats not code. its math notation.

It's literally a lecture

Its a lecture dude.

lmaoooo at your pointless life 🤣😆🤣😆🤣

I'm not finished with the video yet, but it doesn't look like it has any of the hard stuff from Haskell. Unless it goes off the rails, it does seem like a simple enough language to pick up.

The core of haskell is easy to learn [for example there are high-school studies where they taught high school students to make games in haskell], but when you start going into the category theory terminology and making applications that run quickly and writing your program so that it can do what Lisp or Python does with their macros and monkey patching and global state and have it test for your errors at compile time and actually understand the error messages then yeah Haskell is hard.

@@2Cerealbox It literally has 'abilities' from Unison in it. They're like monads but only slightly easier to understand. In addition, it takes everything you know about pure functional programming and throws it out the window because now it uses _logical_ programming instead. Which ok cool, but there are lots of limitations to that and it's **definitely** not easiest for beginners to pick up.

@samwright Abilities are pretty easy to understand

You nailed it. It's basically pure functional programming at the end of the day still, and this is a paradigm many find difficult.

youve not understood what theyre doing, then. its nothing at all lie Go, and its far from uninspired.

little minds are blind to paradigm shifts

Lmaoo i mean there's plenty to critize, but definitly not, that they're afraid to go against the norm. Also have you ever written a single line of go? Lol