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Why care about programming languages

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Re: Why care about programming languages

#21

Post by NortySpock »

xscott wrote: post #15
ulrikrasmussen wrote: post #5

Can't remember who said it, but I think the most poignant commentary about the prospects of LLMs completely replacing humans is the simple observation that yes, you can delegate many if not all of your tasks requiring thinking to LLMs, but it is inherently impossible to delegate the task of understanding . If you hope to write an efficient prompt which gives you what you think you want, you need to actually understan…

> would you rather review LLM-written assembly or LLM-written Haskell? I wish we had a language that was targeted specifically for LLMs to write and humans and LLMs to inspect: - Simple robust syntax - One obvious way to do things - Static type checking - Purely functional encouraged, escape hatches for performance - Inspect-able, testable, and reviewable in small pieces - Something like formal predicates, preconditi…

Gleam ?

Elixir's exhaustive pattern matching and gradual type checking is also on my radar.

I guess I don't know what you mean by effects typing.

Re: Why care about programming languages

#23

Post by byzantinegene »

ulrikrasmussen wrote: post #5

Can't remember who said it, but I think the most poignant commentary about the prospects of LLMs completely replacing humans is the simple observation that yes, you can delegate many if not all of your tasks requiring thinking to LLMs, but it is inherently impossible to delegate the task of understanding . If you hope to write an efficient prompt which gives you what you think you want, you need to actually understan…

we are already at the point where AI proponents are planning to have the review cycle be replaced by llms

Re: Why care about programming languages

#24

Post by IsTom »

xscott wrote: post #15
ulrikrasmussen wrote: post #5

Can't remember who said it, but I think the most poignant commentary about the prospects of LLMs completely replacing humans is the simple observation that yes, you can delegate many if not all of your tasks requiring thinking to LLMs, but it is inherently impossible to delegate the task of understanding . If you hope to write an efficient prompt which gives you what you think you want, you need to actually understan…

> would you rather review LLM-written assembly or LLM-written Haskell? I wish we had a language that was targeted specifically for LLMs to write and humans and LLMs to inspect: - Simple robust syntax - One obvious way to do things - Static type checking - Purely functional encouraged, escape hatches for performance - Inspect-able, testable, and reviewable in small pieces - Something like formal predicates, preconditi…

> escape hatches for performance

These allow the model to cheat in ways that are harder to detect. In actually pure FP you can be sure that it's not counting function invocations to bypass tests.

Re: Why care about programming languages

#25

Post by slopinthebag »

xscott wrote: post #8

There's a lot that's worth thinking about and discussing on this topic, but it's too loaded with emotional stuff for many people to hope for a productive discussion. I'm a programming languages nerd. I was paid to program in over 20 different languages over my 25 year career. I read up on many more languages along the way, and I wrote pet projects in a few of those. I've written a couple assemblers, compilers, and in…

> If you were starting a business for a great software idea, with your own savings on the line, would you hire 10 AI hostile programmers to implement the idea or 2 AI friendly people and get them some subscriptions to the top models? Remember: if it doesn't come together, it's YOUR money on the line.

Actually a pretty interesting question. I think it depends on the software, if it's some web app or something fairly trivial and mechanical the AI friendly devs would probably be cheaper and faster. If it was like, a robotics platform or something I would hire the 10 AI hostile devs. But ideally I would hire 5 expert programmers who use AI in a pragmatic way.

Re: Why care about programming languages

#26

Post by empty_set35204 »

xscott wrote: post #15
ulrikrasmussen wrote: post #5

Can't remember who said it, but I think the most poignant commentary about the prospects of LLMs completely replacing humans is the simple observation that yes, you can delegate many if not all of your tasks requiring thinking to LLMs, but it is inherently impossible to delegate the task of understanding . If you hope to write an efficient prompt which gives you what you think you want, you need to actually understan…

> would you rather review LLM-written assembly or LLM-written Haskell? I wish we had a language that was targeted specifically for LLMs to write and humans and LLMs to inspect: - Simple robust syntax - One obvious way to do things - Static type checking - Purely functional encouraged, escape hatches for performance - Inspect-able, testable, and reviewable in small pieces - Something like formal predicates, preconditi…

I think ocaml is fairly close to this to be honest.

Re: Why care about programming languages

#27

Post by byzantinegene »

xscott wrote: post #8

There's a lot that's worth thinking about and discussing on this topic, but it's too loaded with emotional stuff for many people to hope for a productive discussion. I'm a programming languages nerd. I was paid to program in over 20 different languages over my 25 year career. I read up on many more languages along the way, and I wrote pet projects in a few of those. I've written a couple assemblers, compilers, and in…

why would you even hire 2 AI friendly people when you could just prompt it yourself? we wouldn't even need you anymore

Re: Why care about programming languages

#28

Post by Nekorosu »

ulrikrasmussen wrote: post #5

Can't remember who said it, but I think the most poignant commentary about the prospects of LLMs completely replacing humans is the simple observation that yes, you can delegate many if not all of your tasks requiring thinking to LLMs, but it is inherently impossible to delegate the task of understanding . If you hope to write an efficient prompt which gives you what you think you want, you need to actually understan…

The original quote is from Andrej Karpathy as far as I remember. I do like a lot of his ideas but try to take them with a pinch of salt as he clearly has a technocratic bias regarding LLMs/AI.

Re: Why care about programming languages

#29

Post by ulrikrasmussen »

xscott wrote: post #15
ulrikrasmussen wrote: post #5

Can't remember who said it, but I think the most poignant commentary about the prospects of LLMs completely replacing humans is the simple observation that yes, you can delegate many if not all of your tasks requiring thinking to LLMs, but it is inherently impossible to delegate the task of understanding . If you hope to write an efficient prompt which gives you what you think you want, you need to actually understan…

> would you rather review LLM-written assembly or LLM-written Haskell? I wish we had a language that was targeted specifically for LLMs to write and humans and LLMs to inspect: - Simple robust syntax - One obvious way to do things - Static type checking - Purely functional encouraged, escape hatches for performance - Inspect-able, testable, and reviewable in small pieces - Something like formal predicates, preconditi…

I don't really understand why we need an LLM-specific programming language - all of the properties you list are properties that modern programming language designers already try to achieve.

> - Inspect-able, testable, and reviewable in small pieces

This is more a property of the architecture than a property of the language, although some programming languages support it better than others.

Re: Why care about programming languages

#30

Post by xscott »

IsTom wrote: post #24
xscott wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> would you rather review LLM-written assembly or LLM-written Haskell? I wish we had a language that was targeted specifically for LLMs to write and humans and LLMs to inspect: - Simple robust syntax - One obvious way to do things - Static type checking - Purely functional encouraged, escape hatches for performance - Inspect-able, testable, and reviewable in small pieces - Something like formal predicates, preconditi…

> escape hatches for performance These allow the model to cheat in ways that are harder to detect. In actually pure FP you can be sure that it's not counting function invocations to bypass tests.

Yeah, but sorting algs, FFTs, matrix factorizations, backprop, and many other things just aren't the same with purely functional data structures.

Maybe these well known cases could be hidden in the API, but it's easy to come up with other examples. I forget what Clojure calls it, but they have some notion about things where they're mutable during "birth" and then locked down.

Someone smarter than me knows how to do this right.

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