Please join us for the 2023 Wheeler Lecture, 'Beyond functional programming: a taste of Verse', at 3 pm on Wednesday 15 November.

Our speaker is Simon Peyton Jones, FRS. The lecture takes place in-person in the William Gates Building, followed by refreshments.

Simon Peyton Jones is Engineering Fellow at Epic Games and Honorary Distinguished Fellow of the University of Cambridge Department of Computer Science and Technology.

In this lecture, he'll be talking about Verse - a new programming language, being designed at Epic Games as the language of the metaverse.

"Verse is a functional logic language," he says, "with a bunch of innovative ideas. Like Haskell, Verse is declarative (a variable in Verse stands for just one, immutable value) and higher order (lambdas are first class). But Verse goes well beyond Haskell, with existential variables, unification, expressions that yield multiple values, and much more besides.

"In this talk I'll give you a sense of what functional logic programming is about, what it looks like to program in Verse, and how we can give meaning to Verse programs using rewrite rules."

O ur speaker:

Simon graduated from Trinity College Cambridge in 1980. After two years in industry, he spent seven years as a lecturer at University College London and nine years as a professor at Glasgow University before joining Microsoft Research (Cambridge) in 1998. He moved to Epic Games as an Engineering Fellow in 2022.

Simon’s main research interest is in functional programming languages, their implementation, and their application. He was a key contributor to the design of the now-standard functional language Haskell, and is the lead designer of the widely-used Glasgow Haskell Compiler (GHC). He has written two textbooks about the implementation of functional languages. He is particularly motivated by direct application of principled theory to practical language design and implementation — that is one reason he loves functional programming so much.

Simon is chair of Computing at School, the grass-roots organisation that was at the epicentre of the 2014 reform of the English computing curriculum.

F or those who can't attend in-person, we will also be livestreaming the lecture. The link to join virtually will be https://cam-ac-uk.zoom.us/j/81322468305

The 2023 Wheeler Lecture: 'Beyond functional programming: a taste of Verse'