Will there ever be a new programming language?

4 pointsdanbmil991mo ago6 comments

For as long as I can remember, about once a week or so someone on Hacker News introduced their pet project, a new programming language. It almost seems like a rite of passage to, for some period at least, believe that you can beat the odds and come up with a way of presenting information that improves upon present methods and, just perhaps, goes viral and changes the world of software by some measurable increment.

Will this tendency to reinvent the wheel survive the transition to AI-driven software development? What would be the impetus, when everyone is programming in English (or some other human language), and the 'compiler' has a higher IQ than the 'programmer'? Note that any new language will by definition not be in the corpus of information any frontier model was trained on.

I feel (fear?) we are basically locked in to a world where C, C++, Rust, Go, Python and Javascript will be the assembly code we compile to, and there will be no path or even raison dêtre to improve or innovate in the field of programming languages as we understand them today.

What I do suspect might happen is the AI's themselves propose changes to the base languages that improve their ability to code for us.

Strange times ahead.

6 comments

unsnap_biceps1mo ago

    I feel (fear?) we are basically locked in to a world where C, C++, Rust, Go, Python and Javascript will be the assembly code we compile to

I actually think that AI will largely rendered these "abstractions' meaningless in the future. We need higher order programming languages because it reduces our cognitive load, but AIs won't have the same limitation, and by going directly to the lowest level, they'll be able to find additional performance gains that are way too difficult for compilers to do.

_wire_1mo ago

How about promoting a coding agent to design a new interoperability language for agents? Of all the things AI could expected to help with, could there be any more on-the-nose for combining justification of tech with the agents own interests? Or do you not ask slaves how they want to organize?

Come to think of it, why hasn't an AI coding agent already developed this on its own?!

zzo38computer1mo ago

Not everyone uses AI-driven softawre development, so some people who do not use AI-driven software development might still continue to make new programming languages. (I am one who does not use AI-driven software development.)

However, some people do use AI-driven software development, so it is also possible that some changes will be made due to that as well.

verdverm1mo ago

There is certainly different camps on this, two for demonstration purposes

1. Language catering to Ai

2. Ai had lots of training

I'm in camp 2 because (1) I need to read and understand (2) it seems better to push that level into the weights. I don't want to pollute my context with basics about how to use a language

The same applies more generally, to all sorts of tools, frameworks, and platforms.

svilen_dobrev1mo ago

> The same applies more generally, to all sorts of tools, frameworks, and platforms

yep. When everyone and their dog tells LLM to generate stuff in whatever way LLM knows best, not bothering even reading the output, any new thing is doomed into invisibility and oblivion. So no need of new tool/language-like-things anymore.

Unless someone pickpoints some XYZ and makes artificial ecosystem around it and feeds that into training-next-LLM. Which isn't happening without a major (possibly adversarial) need.

Or, wait until next wave of AI (6th? 8th?) actually combines analytical with generative, making context part of the training, and looping over those..

labrador1mo ago

I agree with you because a new language faces the hurdle that there won't be enough training data in it for AI to become proficient with. On the other hand, suppose AI invents a bespoke DSL and emits a compiler for it. We could get many useful languages this way.

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