Vera: a programming language designed for machines to write • Hacker News Board

Re: Vera: a programming language designed for machines to write

#101

Post by solomonb » Thu, Apr 30, 2026, 4:26 PM UTC

still_grokking wrote: post #33

solomonb wrote: post #10

I think Hindley Milner (for decidability) + Linear Types (for resource management) + Refinement Types (for lightly asserting invariants) + Delimited Continuation based Effects (for tracking effectful code) + Unison style Content Addressability (for corralling code changes, documentation, and tests) would make a really nice language for an LLM.

That's in large parts Scala. It doesn't have Hindley-Milner type inference, but it has very strong type inference. We will get linearity soon thanks to and as part of the Capybara[1] effort. Refinement types are already long a reality. The whole new effect tracking thing is based on delimited continuations. The Unison style content addressability comes up now and then, maybe it will become a reality at some point. It…

AFAIK Scala's type system is not decidable. The point of Hindley Milner (and I really should have said System F without impredicative or higher rank types) was to get decidable polymorphism not type inference.

Re: Vera: a programming language designed for machines to write

#102

Post by svachalek » Thu, Apr 30, 2026, 5:49 PM UTC

drivingmenuts wrote: post #21

svachalek wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah it seems based on 2023 research which is ancient, back when we didn't have coding agents at all, and on some 1980s sci fi concepts of "how machines think" (beedeeboop) rather than the all too human coding agents we have. If I had to design one of these, I'd go for: 1. Token minimization (which may be circular, I'm sure tokens are selected for these models at least in part based on syntax of popular languages) 2.…

> all too human coding agents There is no actual thought occurring. Arguably, we can say the same about a lot of humans at any given moment, but with machines there never is. It's all statistics.

It's statistics based on human coding patterns and human thought patterns (encoded in natural language) though. It's not I AM MODEL 527R1, I AM TOTALLY LOGICAL AND DO NOT UNDERSTAND YOUR HUMAN EMOTIONAL STATES.

Re: Vera: a programming language designed for machines to write

#103

Post by svachalek » Thu, Apr 30, 2026, 6:00 PM UTC

gavmor wrote: post #38

svachalek wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah it seems based on 2023 research which is ancient, back when we didn't have coding agents at all, and on some 1980s sci fi concepts of "how machines think" (beedeeboop) rather than the all too human coding agents we have. If I had to design one of these, I'd go for: 1. Token minimization (which may be circular, I'm sure tokens are selected for these models at least in part based on syntax of popular languages) 2.…

Features written in one file, rather than "cohesive" modules with a single "responsibility" in one file? So, orthogonal to the accepted, common code organization idiom (no matter how infrequently adhered to)? Fascinating! Just the other day I decomposed a massive Demeter violation into stepwise proxying "message passing." I was concerned that implementing this entire feature—well, at least a solid chunk of it— as a s…

Ha. It's a thought, at least. I've been programming for about 45 years and have seen the industry go through idioms like fashion. I remember the source to one popular video game, I think it was Quake, was organized into 26 files. Everything was located based on the first character of its name.

One idea for isolating features was "cross cutting" and "aspect oriented programming" that never caught on but I've always thought it was under-explored.

My day job is collecting a type of analytics for a major global company. Every new point of data involves changing about 1 line in about 10 different applications that talk to each other, sometimes adjusting schemas and report formats as well. Takes weeks to coordinate the rollout. It's super tedious. But, perhaps there's a prompt that tells the models how to do this whole process without human intervention. And that would be saved as a skill file, that provides the needed cross-cut across many files/applications/schemas/repos, letting the code live in conventional organization.

Hard to say. We're still in early times, I think.

Re: Vera: a programming language designed for machines to write

#104

Post by pixel_popping » Thu, Apr 30, 2026, 6:33 PM UTC

MarceliusK wrote: post #96

drob518 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My Spidey sense was tingling when I saw that, too. An additional issue is how humans are supposed to read the code at all so that they can provide help to the LLM if it’s off track. If the code is only usable by models, the models need to be good enough to deal with binary feedback (“Code doesn’t work.”). The human won’t be able to read the code and steer the model. Given the levels of steering required today, that m…

Even if the target author is an LLM, the accountability still lands on humans eventually

not necessarily, someday we might have businesses entirely managed by agents, including the ownership and crafting itself, probably accepting crypto only where absolutely no human oversight will exist, even the money made might not be distributed to humans.