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Nerd: A language for LLMs, not humans

nerd-lang.org

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Re: Nerd: A language for LLMs, not humans

#11

Post by synalx »

One major disadvantage here is the lack of training data on a "new" language, even if it's more efficient. At least in the short term, this means needing to teach the LLM your language in the context window.

I've spent a good bit of time exploring this space in the context of web frameworks and templating languages. One technique that's been highly effective is starting with a _very_ minimal language with only the most basic concepts. Describe that to the LLM, ask it to solve a small scale problem (which the language is likely not yet capable of doing), and see what kinds of APIs or syntax it hallucinates. Then add that to your language, and repeat. Obviously there's room for adjustment along the way, but we've found this process is able to cut many many lines from the system prompts that are otherwise needed to explain new syntax styles to the LLM.

Re: Nerd: A language for LLMs, not humans

#12

Post by perons »

That looks to me like Forth with extra steps and less clarity? Not sure why I'd choose it over something with the same semantic advantages ("terse english" but in a programming language), but just agressively worse for a human operator to debug.

Re: Nerd: A language for LLMs, not humans

#13

Post by knlb »

> Do you debug JVM bytecode? V8's internals? No. You debug at your abstraction layer

In the fullness of time, you end up having to. Or at least I have. Which is why I always dislike additional layers and transforms at this point.

(eg. when I think about react native on android, I hear "now I'll have to be excellent at react/javascript and android/java/kotlin and C++ to be able to debug the bridge; not that "I can get away with just javascript".)

Re: Nerd: A language for LLMs, not humans

#14

Post by dented42 »

I can’t be alone in this, but this seems like a supremely terrible idea. I reject whole heartedly the idea that any sizeable portion of one’s code base should specifically /not/ be human interpretable as a design choice.

There’s a chance this is a joke, but even if it is I don’t wanna give the AI tech bros more terrible ideas, they have enough. ;)

Re: Nerd: A language for LLMs, not humans

#15

Post by gnanagurusrgs »

wmoxam wrote: post #7
gnanagurusrgs wrote: post #2

Creator here. This started as a dumb question while using Claude Code: "Why is Claude writing TypeScript I'm supposed to read?" 40% of code is now machine-written. That number's only going up. So I spent some weekends asking: what would an intermediate language look like if we stopped pretending humans are the authors? NERD is the experiment. Bootstrap compiler works, compiles to native via LLVM. It's rough, probably…

> 40% of code is now machine-written How did you arrive at that number?

Ran a simple test with the examples you find in the project. Will publish those benchmarks.. actually that makes me think, I should probably do a public test suite showing the results. :)

Re: Nerd: A language for LLMs, not humans

#16

Post by wilsonnb3 »

> Do you debug JVM bytecode? V8's internals? No. You debug at your abstraction layer. If that layer is natural language, debugging becomes: "Hey Claude, the login is failing for users with + in their email."

I debug at my abstraction layer because I can trust that my compiler actually works, LLMs are fundamentally different and need to produce human readable code.

Re: Nerd: A language for LLMs, not humans

#18

Post by gnanagurusrgs »

kevml wrote: post #8
gnanagurusrgs wrote: post #2

Creator here. This started as a dumb question while using Claude Code: "Why is Claude writing TypeScript I'm supposed to read?" 40% of code is now machine-written. That number's only going up. So I spent some weekends asking: what would an intermediate language look like if we stopped pretending humans are the authors? NERD is the experiment. Bootstrap compiler works, compiles to native via LLVM. It's rough, probably…

It’s an interesting thought experiment! My first questions boil down to the security and auditability of the code. How easy is it for a human to comprehend the code?

It is still very visible, auditable, and one of the features I'm hoping to add is a more visual layer that shows the nook and corners of the code, coming up soon. But regardless, the plain code itself is readable and visible, but it's not as friendly as the other languages for humans.
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