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Nanolang: A tiny experimental language designed to be targeted by coding LLMs

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Re: Nanolang: A tiny experimental language designed to be targeted by coding LLMs

#131

Post by datsci_est_2015 »

trklausss wrote: post #108
deepsquirrelnet wrote: post #25

At this point, I am starting to feel like we don’t need new languages, but new ways to create specifications. I have a hypothesis that an LLM can act as a pseudocode to code translator, where the pseudocode can tolerate a mixture of code-like and natural language specification. The benefit being that it formalizes the human as the specifier (which must be done anyway) and the llm as the code writer. This also might e…

Ah, people are starting to see the light. This is something that could be distilled from some industries like aviation, where specification of software (requirements, architecture documents, etc.) is even more important that the software itself. The problem is that natural language is in itself ambiguous, and people don't really grasp the importance of clear specification (how many times I have repeated to put units…

> The problem is that natural language is in itself ambiguous

This is literally what software developers are actually paid to do. They are not paid to write code. This is reinventing software development.

Re: Nanolang: A tiny experimental language designed to be targeted by coding LLMs

#132

Post by QuadmasterXLII »

deepsquirrelnet wrote: post #25

At this point, I am starting to feel like we don’t need new languages, but new ways to create specifications. I have a hypothesis that an LLM can act as a pseudocode to code translator, where the pseudocode can tolerate a mixture of code-like and natural language specification. The benefit being that it formalizes the human as the specifier (which must be done anyway) and the llm as the code writer. This also might e…

coding in latex and then translating to the target via llm works remarkably well nowadays

Re: Nanolang: A tiny experimental language designed to be targeted by coding LLMs

#133

Post by Footprint0521 »

deepsquirrelnet wrote: post #25

At this point, I am starting to feel like we don’t need new languages, but new ways to create specifications. I have a hypothesis that an LLM can act as a pseudocode to code translator, where the pseudocode can tolerate a mixture of code-like and natural language specification. The benefit being that it formalizes the human as the specifier (which must be done anyway) and the llm as the code writer. This also might e…

Go read ai2027 and then be ashamed of yourself /s

But seriously, llms can transmit ideas to each other through English that we do understand, we are screwed if it’s another language lol

Re: Nanolang: A tiny experimental language designed to be targeted by coding LLMs

#134

Post by e12e »

vidarh wrote: post #115
e12e wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True, with early return - there's no need to actually nest with else. Logically this still would be a case/switch though...

The point was that logically it would be an array lookup by index. There's no need for any conditional construct here whatsoever. You'll note it has already constructed a string in the right order to do that, but then copped out with the if-else.

True enough. On that note, I had a look at the language reference - there's arrays - but also this:

    (char_at s index)        # Get ASCII value at index (0-based)
    (string_from_char code)  # Create string from ASCII value
So, you can pluck a character... From an UTF-8 string? What if the rendering used multibyte characters?

Re: Nanolang: A tiny experimental language designed to be targeted by coding LLMs

#135

Post by larodi »

deepsquirrelnet wrote: post #25

At this point, I am starting to feel like we don’t need new languages, but new ways to create specifications. I have a hypothesis that an LLM can act as a pseudocode to code translator, where the pseudocode can tolerate a mixture of code-like and natural language specification. The benefit being that it formalizes the human as the specifier (which must be done anyway) and the llm as the code writer. This also might e…

we have some markup for architectures like - d2lang, sequencediagram.org's, bpmn.io xmls (which are OMG XMLs), so question is - can we master these, and not invent new stuf for a while?

p.s. a combination of the above fares very well during my agentic coding adventures.

Re: Nanolang: A tiny experimental language designed to be targeted by coding LLMs

#136

Post by mike_hearn »

keepamovin wrote: post #124
mike_hearn wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm also looking at this topic right now. I think you're right within limits but the issue is semantics and obscure features. If the language differs from existing languages in only trivial ways, then LLMs can pick it up quickly. But then the value of such a language is trivial. If you deviate in bigger ways, it's harder to properly use just based on pre-existing code. Here's a simple case study: Kotlin is semantical…

This sounds academic, like a thought experiment. I have experience and can tell you this is not the case. I am using a significantly different language and the LLMs have 0 problem using it. There's likely challenges here, but it's not the ones you're seeing so far.

OK, that's valuable to know, but how is your language different? You were discussing syntax previously. How well does the LLM handle your language's different standard library and how big is it?

Re: Nanolang: A tiny experimental language designed to be targeted by coding LLMs

#137

Post by mike_hearn »

gritzko wrote: post #127
mike_hearn wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Was it cancelled? I thought MPS works that way.

I meant specifically revision control. JetBrains' school of thought is very much AST-centric, yes.

I think MPS stores projects as serialized ASTs and can do VCS merging.

Re: Nanolang: A tiny experimental language designed to be targeted by coding LLMs

#138

Post by verdverm »

catlifeonmars wrote: post #82
verdverm wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I'm not going to fill my precious context with documentation for a programming language This seems like a research dead end to me, the fundamentals are not there

It seems kind of silly that you can’t teach an LLM new tricks though, doesn’t it? This doesn’t sound like an intrinsic limitation and more an artifact of how we produce model weights today.

getting tricks embedded into the weights is expensive, it doesn't happen in a single pass

they's why we teach them new tricks on the fly (in-context learning) with instruction files

Re: Nanolang: A tiny experimental language designed to be targeted by coding LLMs

#139

Post by gritzko »

mike_hearn wrote: post #137
gritzko wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I meant specifically revision control. JetBrains' school of thought is very much AST-centric, yes.

I think MPS stores projects as serialized ASTs and can do VCS merging.

Great. But MPS is not a revision control system.

Re: Nanolang: A tiny experimental language designed to be targeted by coding LLMs

#140

Post by [deleted] »

mike_hearn wrote: post #136
keepamovin wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This sounds academic, like a thought experiment. I have experience and can tell you this is not the case. I am using a significantly different language and the LLMs have 0 problem using it. There's likely challenges here, but it's not the ones you're seeing so far.

OK, that's valuable to know, but how is your language different? You were discussing syntax previously. How well does the LLM handle your language's different standard library and how big is it?

[deleted]
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