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Why care about programming languages

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Re: Why care about programming languages

#31

Post by ulrikrasmussen »

hcfman wrote: post #19
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…

That’s a little black and white though. It’s ruling out that the AI could make a pretty good guess as to what you likely wanted to convey. If it gets that right, then you didn’t need to understand it nearly much. When I observe its reasoning I see it doing this all the time.

Sure, but at that point it hardly makes sense to discuss any of the details of the implementation since we are just treating the LLM as a black box. For all we know, it could be maintaining its own specialized programming language made just for the application.

Re: Why care about programming languages

#32

Post by sriku »

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…

Lean seems to fit your ask fairly well.

Re: Why care about programming languages

#33

Post by armchairhacker »

If an LLM actually does think like a human, humans benefit from good programming languages, why wouldn’t an LLM?

Programming languages allow LLMs to build invariants they can’t enforce themselves (type systems), reduce context window (syntax sugar) and represent abstract models in a way that may improve understanding i.e. increase the likelihood of predicting a correct next token.

Plus, we want to understand LLM output, so it should at least be convertible into a language that’s easy for humans.

EDIT: and actually reading the article, learning a new programming paradigm improves your ability to model even in your head, by noticing some abstract thing fits some programming concept, then manipulating the concept (e.g. translation your data model into the algebraic data type,`(a | b) * (a | c)`, then realizing it’s isomorphic to `a * (b | c)`).

Re: Why care about programming languages

#34

Post by Foobar8568 »

kusokurae wrote: post #4
alpha_trion wrote: post #2

I think a lot of folks in the industry are feeling this way. It’s an existential crisis for many of us right now. Why bother progressing when slop is “good enough”? Some of us still care but I have a feeling there are a lot of people that don’t.

Good enough IFF you are dealing with a cute web app or simple SAAS or something. Software engineers feeling down should think about software designed to track medication administration, or validate their tax calculations, or to decide whether to flag you for a CIFAS marker, or whatever, and then imagine the generic "fuck it, that'll do" type vibecoder-level-engineer handling the code.

Novartis outsourced most of its development in India, also lots of medicine is manufactured there in dubious conditions and has been for years, if not decades, the ship has sailed long before AI slop.

Re: Why care about programming languages

#35

Post by actionfromafar »

B-Con wrote: post #18
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…

Go seems like a pragmatic fit, even though it was obviously not designed for LLMs and nor is it purely functional. I review a lot of Go code, which means I review a lot of LLM Go code. Even though the human vs LLM authorship distinction has strong signals, Go's simple nature seems like a useful constraint on how LLMs can express themselves.

I agree it's easy to read. But you also have to read a lot of it, before anything interesting happens.

Re: Why care about programming languages

#36

Post by zero_shift »

B-Con wrote: post #18
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…

Go seems like a pragmatic fit, even though it was obviously not designed for LLMs and nor is it purely functional. I review a lot of Go code, which means I review a lot of LLM Go code. Even though the human vs LLM authorship distinction has strong signals, Go's simple nature seems like a useful constraint on how LLMs can express themselves.

- Too verbose, too much noise e.g. error handling.

- Type system is too concrete, can't express sets or unions.

- Not much support for functional programming except passing closures

- Can't express immutability. Well, there's const, but it's crippled

These things mean Go falls short of what GP wants.

But Go has very distinct and (honestly kinda weird) design goals, it isn't really supposed to be "the simple applications language". It's supposed to be "C with NewSqueak", very much a systems programming language. You see that in its aggressively concrete type system

Re: Why care about programming languages

#37

Post by est »

I think PL will have a second coming. Just like Linus Torvalds said:

> AI is a productivity tool exactly like compilers were. Compilers boosted programming by 1000x. AI adds another 10x on top. Enormous. But nobody says "the compiler wrote my code."

We witness more and more PL ideas re-invented in Agentic AI world. Branching, looping, task orchestration, workflow, etc.

Heck even GOTO seems tempting these days.

Re: Why care about programming languages

#38

Post by latexr »

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?

Are you saying that 10 programmers cost as much as 2 random people and some LLM subscriptions? Sign me up for the 10 programmers, then. I wouldn’t even need most of them, I’ve done a lot with teams of two and three, and more may just get in the way. I couldn’t care less how “AI friendly” the other people are; if they’re not programmers, using LLMs to produce a program is going to lead to bad results. Why would I even hire them? Might as well do the prompting myself if the results are that good in your fantasy scenario.

> Remember: if it doesn't come together, it's YOUR money on the line.

So, if it doesn’t come together, I either empowered 10 people to feed their families, gave them opportunities to hone their skills, and possibly developed new friendships and contacts for future endeavours (where maybe next time they’ll even hire me); or I helped just 2 people with no return and lined the pockets of rich people who are actively exploiting everyone else and destroying the environment and social trust for personal profit.

Your scenario is truly bizarre. Is it just an obvious ploy to detect those who lack in empathy and only think of personal profit?

Re: Why care about programming languages

#39

Post by trinari »

armchairhacker wrote: post #33

If an LLM actually does think like a human, humans benefit from good programming languages, why wouldn’t an LLM? Programming languages allow LLMs to build invariants they can’t enforce themselves (type systems), reduce context window (syntax sugar) and represent abstract models in a way that may improve understanding i.e. increase the likelihood of predicting a correct next token. Plus, we want to understand LLM outp…

Yep, it helps llms, and the same is true for libraries. Technically neither are necessary. Imagine an llm that's restricted to assembly.

Re: Why care about programming languages

#40

Post by simianwords »

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…

That was Yacine Twitter account and it’s false. You can delegate the task of understanding. This looks like a popular folk theory that also falls under scrutiny.
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