I didn’t find the metaverse stuff to be a compelling motivation for the programming language features described. It felt to me more like ‘I had some ideas about programming languages after 20+ years of Haskell and research. Here’s my plan to unify logic programming with more normal functional programming (also we’re getting rid of monads). By the way my boss cares about the metaverse.’ But maybe that is too cynical.

The metaverse things used to motivate this language don’t seem new to me either. Aren’t they basically ‘works well with concurrency’ and ‘somehow the language that finally makes it easy for different programs written by different people to talk to each other’ which don’t seem to be new goals in programming language design as far as I’m aware. But maybe I’m being uncharitable in my interpretation.

I’ve not looked at the associated paper or tried to understand what the metaverse is so maybe things are better discussed there. Or maybe they are glossed over because the presentation was for PLT people rather than metaverse people and I think many of the former would be turned off by a talk about the metaverse.

This doesn’t strike me as a very serious attempt to predict the future and design a programming language based on that prediction (though few such attempts exist for the design of most things in tech, and they needn’t correspond to success). It seems more like taking a punt and exploring a new point in the programming language design space that may be relevant.

I think it is interesting to look at what happened with Fortress for comparison:

- Well known PLT person (Guy Steele of scheme, CL, Java fame) in a reasonably funded industrial research lab

- they started with ideas about where computers were going around 20 years ago. So high core counts, big memory vs cpu frequency divergence, NUMA/HPC architectures. And an increasingly difficult amount of legacy Fortran code

- developed an idea for a language that would be easier to write parallel scientific programs in

- eg functional, map-reduce paradigm

- added in some known features like typeclasses (monads for map reduce)

- some other random features/ideas

- wrote a bunch of papers

- not that much actually came of it, I think

Maybe they weren’t good at executing on making a language people wanted, or maybe that was never the goal. Or maybe they were too early – a lot of the ideas became more important with gpu compute but most people still write those programs at a much lower level.