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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

#151

Post by GrowingSideways »

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…

> The benefit being that it formalizes the human as the specifier (which must be done anyway) and the llm as the code writer.

The code was always a secondary effect of making software. The pain is in fully specifying behavior.

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

#152

Post by rzmmm »

nemo1618 wrote: post #94
thorum wrote: post #6

Developed by Jordan Hubbard of NVIDIA (and FreeBSD). My understanding/experience is that LLM performance in a language scales with how well the language is represented in the training data. From that assumption, we might expect LLMs to actually do better with an existing language for which more training code is available, even if that language is more complex and seems like it should be “harder” to understand.

Blackpill is that, for this reason, the mainstream languages we have today will be the final (human-designed) languages to be relevant on a global scale. Eventually AIs will create their own languages. And humans will, of course, continue designing hobbyist languages for fun. But in terms of influence, there will not be another human language that takes the programming world by storm. There simply is not enough time…

My impression is that AI models need large amounts of quality training data. "Data contamination", i.e. AI output in the training data set has been a problem for years.

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

#153

Post by whimsicalism »

measurablefunc wrote: post #103
thorum wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Go read the DeepSeek R1 paper

Why would I do that? If you know something then quote the relevant passage & equation that says you can train code generators w/ RL on a novel language w/ little to no code to train on. More generally, don't ask random people on the internet to do work for you for free.

well, that’s one way to react to being provided with interesting reading material.

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

#154

Post by whimsicalism »

thorum wrote: post #117
measurablefunc wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would I do that? If you know something then quote the relevant passage & equation that says you can train code generators w/ RL on a novel language w/ little to no code to train on. More generally, don't ask random people on the internet to do work for you for free.

Your other comment sounded like you were interested in learning about how AI labs are applying RL to improve programming capability. If so, the DeepSeek R1 paper is a good introduction to the topic (maybe a bit out of date at this point, but very approachable). RL training works fine for low resource languages as long as you have tooling to verify outputs and enough compute to throw at the problem.

imo generally not worth it to keep going when you encounter this sort of HN archetype

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

#155

Post by [deleted] »

mike_hearn wrote: post #141
gritzko wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great. But MPS is not a revision control system.

Ah I see. You mean they were trying to build a custom VCS that had special support for AST merging. MPS uses regular git with custom merge drivers to do AST-level merging instead of textual merging, but that's a bit different

[deleted]

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

#157

Post by adastra22 »

PunchyHamster wrote: post #100
adastra22 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think that assumption holds. For example, only recently have agents started getting Rust code right on the first try, but that hasn’t mattered in the past because the rust compiler and linters give such good feedback that it immediately fixes whatever goof it made. This does fill up context a little faster, (1) not as much as debugging the problem would have in a dynamic language, and (2) better agentic frame…

so you're saying... the assumption actually holds

No, it’s the exact opposite of the assumption. It doesn’t matter how represented the language is in the training data, so long as the surrounding infrastructure is good.

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

#158

Post by GrowingSideways »

adastra22 wrote: post #30
thorum wrote: post #6

Developed by Jordan Hubbard of NVIDIA (and FreeBSD). My understanding/experience is that LLM performance in a language scales with how well the language is represented in the training data. From that assumption, we might expect LLMs to actually do better with an existing language for which more training code is available, even if that language is more complex and seems like it should be “harder” to understand.

I don’t think that assumption holds. For example, only recently have agents started getting Rust code right on the first try, but that hasn’t mattered in the past because the rust compiler and linters give such good feedback that it immediately fixes whatever goof it made. This does fill up context a little faster, (1) not as much as debugging the problem would have in a dynamic language, and (2) better agentic frame…

> only recently have agents started getting Rust code right on the first try

This is such a silly thing to say. Either you set the bar so low that "hello world" qualifies or you expect LLMs to be able to reason about lifetimes, which they clearly cannot. But LLMs were never very good at full-program reasoning in any language.

I don't see this language fixing this, but it's not trying to—it just seems to be removing cruft

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

#160

Post by verdverm »

catlifeonmars wrote: post #148
verdverm wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Right, it sounds like an artificial limitation.

it's more a mathematical / algorithmic limitation
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