Talks, Lectures, and Tutorials¶

A curated collection of presentations about the Verse programming language, from language design and theory to practical game development.

Language Design¶

Talks covering Verse's core design as a functional logic language, its type system, and its formal foundations.

The Verse Programming Language: Official introduction to Verse as a universal programming language for building interconnected virtual worlds and the metaverse.
Beyond Functional Programming: A Taste of Verse -- Simon Peyton Jones (& Tim Sweeney): Introduces Verse as a functional logic language with existential variables, unification, and expressions that yield multiple values. Given at multiple venues in 2023:; Lambda Days (with Sweeney) | ZuriHac | Wheeler Lecture, Cambridge | IRIF Paris | other
Verse: A New Functional Logic Language -- Lennart Augustsson: What functional logic programming is about, what it looks like to program in Verse, and how meaning is given to programs using rewrite rules. Given at multiple venues:; GOTO Copenhagen 2023 | REBASE, SPLASH 2024 | Lambda World 2025
On Creating a Virtual Machine for Verse: Saam Barati | REBASE, SPLASH 2025 (Singapore); Covers AutoRTFM and a bespoke VM designed from scratch for Verse's runtime, object model, and bytecode interpreter.
Another Taste of Verse: Simon Peyton Jones | ZuriHac 2026; Sequel to the 2023 talk, focusing on types, patterns, and denotational semantics. How Verse unifies expressions, patterns, and types into the same thing.

Academic papers and their conference presentations.

The Verse Calculus: A Core Calculus for Deterministic Functional Logic Programming: Augustsson, Breitner, Claessen, Jhala, Peyton Jones, Shivers, Sweeney, Steele | ICFP 2023 (Distinguished Paper); Presents the Verse Calculus with a small-step rewrite semantics, confluent for well-behaved terms, enabling lambda-calculus-style reasoning about functional logic programs.

In-depth lecture series for learning Verse's theoretical foundations.

The Verse Language: Types, Semantics, and Verification: Simon Peyton Jones | OPLSS 2026 (Oregon Programming Languages Summer School); Four lectures covering Verse's type system, rewrite semantics, denotational semantics, and verification.; Code: augustss/verse-semantics

Lecture	Topic	Video	Slides	Notes
1	Introduction	mp4	pptx	pdf
2	Rewrite Semantics	mp4	pptx	pdf
3	Denotational Semantics	mp4	pptx	pdf
4	Verification	mp4	pptx	pdf

Longer-form conversations about Verse's design philosophy and its place in the programming language landscape.

Exploring Verse, Haskell, Language Design and Teaching: Simon Peyton Jones, interviewed by Kris Jenkins | Developer Voices, Jan 2024; SPJ's history with Haskell, formalizing functional logic programming with Verse, building languages from a small tightly-designed core, and computing education.
Haskell, Verse, Strong Type Systems and Tasteful Abstractions: Simon Peyton Jones | Rock the Code, Apr 2026; Type classes, GADTs, Verse's types-as-functions and expressions-as-patterns, subtyping vs parametric polymorphism, and LLM-generated code verification.

Verse Concurrency -- Time Flow: Everything, Everywhere in UEFN, All at Once: Conan Reis (Principal Engineer, Epic Games) | Unreal Fest 2023; How Verse concurrency makes it easy to author sophisticated time-based behavior. Covers each of Verse's concurrency expressions and related API constructs.
Powering Up Your Projects With Scene Graph and Verse: Epic Games | Unreal Fest Orlando 2025; Building games in UEFN with Scene Graph and Verse: creating reusable prefabs and custom Verse components with side-by-side comparisons.

Coding with Verse: Multi-part series covering Verse from the ground up inside UEFN.
UEFN Verse For Beginners Free Course: Multi-lesson course covering variables, functions, and building your first game with Verse.

Chapter and Verse: An Outsider's Overview: Paul Snively | LambdaConf 2025; Verse's influences (Ontic, Icon, Curry), relationship to existing Epic languages (UnrealScript, Blueprints), the Verse Calculus, and its Curry-style type system.