Verse: A New Scripting Language? In THIS Economy?

Logan Smith explains the design of Epic Games' Verse programming language, focusing on its unique effects system and type variance.

The art of learning new programming languages is at risk due to AI. Meanwhile, Verse is set to replace Blueprints in Unreal Engine 6. How will we, as a society, brace ourselves to handle that? This video seeks to single-handedly solve all of the world's problems. The "Moves Are Broken" video thumbnail was made by my friend and occasional colleague Michelle Lee. michellemlee.com This might be sloppy, but my understanding of the function type variance thing has to do with the fact that in covariant function types, their _parameters_ are contravariant. I think of "computes" and "reads/writes/allocates" being like "environments" that are passed into the function, and the "computes environment" is a SUPERtype of the "reads/writes/allocates environment" (just like const T* is a supertype of T*), which means that functions _taking_ those environments as a parameter are flipped, with the "computes" function being a subtype of the "reads/writes/allocates" function. The Verse "decides" effect sort of reminds me of being inside the Maybe monad in Haskell. Verse also has "nondeterminism" built in to control flow structures like loops, where it's sort of like you're inside the List monad. Maybe I'll make a video talking about that at some point. Or, if you never want me to make another Verse video, you better tell me now. I use the amazing Manim library for animating these videos, and I edit them with Blender (isn't that weird?) and Audacity (the program and sometimes the concept). manim.community/ blender.org/ audacityteam.org/