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Comment by DethNinja | Hacker News Reader

It is pure speculation but I don’t believe Epic’s Verse language will be a functional programming language.

Verse is more intended for Blueprint people and there is no way people working on the Blueprint code will be able to move into functional programming.

Also I don’t get the investment into Verse language itself, why not just fund LuaJit, do we really need another scripting language when LUA nailed some many things right?

I guess Epic will craft a pretty fast scripting language and try to lock game developers to their own ecosystem.

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I don't know, Simon has been big on "spreadsheets as functional programming" for a bit. Something blueprinty built with that point of view might be both "functional" and approachable.

>Simon has been big on "spreadsheets as functional programming"

Thanks for the keyword quote. Interesting topic as I felt Spreadsheet is very under-represented form of programming. Especially when trillions of dollars relies on Excel to function properly.

He's got some interesting talks on the topic, and sometimes the slides aren't in comic sans!

Blueprint is already basically Haskell, I've done both and the similarities are striking. I think the world is ready for a proper visual programming language that plays nice with git, compiles down to native code and has all the nice abstractions that Haskell offers and none of the downsides of a scripting language. No doubt SPJ is one of the people who can help make that dream a reality, not in small part because just his presence will attract the best and brightest to Epic.

> Blueprint is already basically Haskell

It doesn't have lambdas/closures. You have to create a whole separate object in a separate file to pass something new with data that can be called later.

Alright, it's maybe a bit hyperbole. If I'm thinking about what characterises Haskell, it's not that it has closures, it's that it makes control flow and side effects explicit through monads. Blueprint has a very similar idea where effectful/stateful code is ordered sequentially through the white lines, while pure functions are hooked up just through their inputs and outputs. It doesn't go much deeper than that, but looking at Haskell it seems blueprint really might go a lot deeper.

Visual languages can be quite functional, specially when they map into IC like modules.

Honestly Lua is a horrible, terrible language. It's only gotten so widespread because it's trivial to embed.

It my not be FP, but I imagine it will be heavily type dependent and Haskell has one of the best type systems of any programming language.

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