Simon Peyton Jones

They're not strictly comparable.

They all have things in which they're more powerful than the other, probably.

I think it's actually hard to identify, to say, here's a problem we want to solve.

Let's try to solve it.

Another way to tackle it is to say, what are interesting new languages out there that are exploring very different parts of the design space?

And there I think I do have a candidate.

So the language that is my day job, I work for Epic, and we're designing a programming language called Verse.

Now, Verse is a very exotic language.

It's really a functional logic language.

So it's yet more expressive than Haskell.

It has a phototic type system, but a very different one to Haskell's.

So if you like, the way I think of it is like this.

If you look at C and Fortran, they look pretty different if you're an imperative programmer.

But if you look at them, if you zoom out, still you can see functional languages, then C and Fortran are pretty close together.

you know, along with object-oriented languages, they're all in a clump, right?

And then there's some functional languages, you know, Haskell and ML and OCaml and Scala out here.

If you zoom out still further, then the imperative languages and functional languages are all together, and Verse is way out here, right?

So, Verse is exploring a very new point in the design space.

But just like functional programming back in 1980,

It seems sufficiently interesting and cool and unusual and weird that it's worth exploring, right?