No offense, but: does this actually relate the metaverse, or was that part added in so Epic Games would fund it? I don't see any first-class features that would be specific to that use case.
Verse and the metaverse were ideas at Epic Games long before SPJ was an employee at Epic games (at least 10 years before).
Hopefully we'll get more useful info soon, once it can be used in Fortnite.
Speak for yourself! I got a lot from it that feels immediately practical for my current projects as well as others I want to take on, and it makes logic programming concepts and benefits much more accessible to me than any amount of Prolog literature has so far (granted I came in wanting to be compelled).
I'm approaching it from the angle that I don't see how functional programming is at all useful for the kind of gameplay programming that would be done in a "metaverse" or is done in Unreal Engine today. So "it can do functional programming stuff" by itself doesn't cause any excitement. Rather the opposite. There are zero code examples of using it for anything besides abstract math. It executing code out of order seems to serve no purpose besides letting people create undecipherable monstrosities with it.
I'd maybe sum up this presentation as "we took functional programming and tried to make it less unusable by letting you actually mutate state" but I'm still lacking the original motivation of why I'd want to use that in the first place.
- null safety
- deferred evaluation of expressions with unresolved dependencies
- types as first class values
- the real thing functional programming is about: making it possible to know what value is bound to a thing at any point in a program
The first is valuable for any program, the last is valuable for any program with multiple inputs (so, games, but also basically any human facing program because IO, or really just any program with users and real world interfaces), and types as values is a world of oysters if you like what types afford for development.
Edit: lol I forgot to expand on deferred evaluation, it’s a really good model for distributed users but could also be a good model for highly dynamic applications like one I maintain where there’s a hard constraint on synchronous execution but currently a very lazy model of what needs to be executed.
For instance this might be super mario... mario moves forward or the gumba moves forward or mario hits the gumba and mario enters death animation and the gumba stops or mario hits the gumba from above and the gumba enters death animation or mario hits a coin box and a his coins increase and mario stops and the box enters coin animation.