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I built a programming language using Claude Code
161–170 of 194 posts
Re: I built a programming language using Claude Code
#162Earlier quoted context omitted.
Odd choice of a comment to post this reply to. I guess you're just not going to believe what anyone says.
> Odd choice of a comment to post this reply to. How? They claimed LLMs somehow enabled them to write more code in the span of 3.5 years (assuming they started with ChatGPT's introduction) than they would be able to write in the span of decades. No studies have shown this. But at least one study did show that LLM devs overestimate how productive these systems make them.
> How?
You're calling this person a liar because they don't have a study to back up their personal anecdote. Which is a strange position to take imo.
Re: I built a programming language using Claude Code
#163Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don’t agree with the idea that programming languages don’t have an impact of an LLM to write code. If anything, I imagine that, all else being equal, a language where the compiler enforces multiple levels of correctness would help the AI get to a goal faster.
A good example of this is Rust. Rust is by default memory safe when compared to say, C, at the expense of you having to be deliberate in managing memory. With LLMs this equation changes significantly because that harder/more verbose code is being written by the LLM, so it won't slow you down nearly as much. Even better, the LLM can interact with the compiler if something is not exactly as it should. On a different bu…
I was under the impression from Rust developers that it was one of the languages LLMs struggled with a bit more than others? My view could be (probably is) very outdated.
Re: I built a programming language using Claude Code
#164Earlier quoted context omitted.
You may underestimate the weirdness of existing declarative data transformation languages. On a scale of 1 to 10, XSLT is about a 2 or 3.
Mine's a weird, bad copy of Ab Initio's DML. https://www.google.com/search?q=ab+initio+dml+language
When you say "weird" you mean "different from mainstream languages", but the exact way in which your language is weird (declarative data description/transformation) is probably exactly where languages will be going in the future because of how well-suited they are for LLM reading and writing. Those languages expose the structure of the computation directly such as data shapes and the relationships that transform them, rather than burying intent inside control flow.
With more explicit types and dataflow information, the model doesn't need to simulate execution (something LLMs are particularly bad at) as much as recognize and extend a transformation graph (something LLMs are particularly good at). So it's probably just that your particularly weird language is particularly well-adapted to LLM technology.
Re: I built a programming language using Claude Code
#165Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Odd choice of a comment to post this reply to. How? They claimed LLMs somehow enabled them to write more code in the span of 3.5 years (assuming they started with ChatGPT's introduction) than they would be able to write in the span of decades. No studies have shown this. But at least one study did show that LLM devs overestimate how productive these systems make them.
> How? You're calling this person a liar because they don't have a study to back up their personal anecdote. Which is a strange position to take imo.
It's strange that I don't accept unverified anecdotes on their face, especially when they contradict the best evidence available? Also
> calling this person a liar
"Liar" implies a deliberate attempt to deceive, but I specifically mentioned the possibility that these tools just make you feel much more productive than you actually are, as at least one study found. But I'm sure a lot of these anecdotes are, in fact, lies from liars (bots/shills). The fact that Anthropic has to resort to stuff like this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47282777
should make everyone suspicious of the extravagant claims being made about Claude.
Re: I built a programming language using Claude Code
#166Earlier quoted context omitted.
So you’re hoping for a blackbox uninspectable by humans? That to me sounds like a nightmare, a nightmare worse than all the cruft and stupid rules humanity accrued over time. Let’s hope the future tech is inspectable and understandable by humans.
I think if we assume that AGI will be a thing the odds of future tech remaining inspectable by humans is pretty unlikely. Would you build a car so that your dog can maintain it?
Fully understandable end to end by any normal human and inspectable enough for human governance are different things. In any sane world, AGI would be built inside a human institutional environment: laws, audits, liability, safety engineering, access controls, operational constraints, etc. We do not build planes so passengers can reconstruct the turbine from scratch, but we still require them to be inspectable by the people responsible for certifying/repairing them. The right standard is not whether an average person can rebuild or fully undestand the whole machine, but whether human institutions can reliably inspect, verify and govern it. If they can’t, then the technology is not mature enough to trust.
Re: I built a programming language using Claude Code
#167This is something I've been thinking a bit about in the last few months.
TL;DR I don't think an LLM can create a language from scratch better than what we have. To LLMs they operate on a hoffoman coded format. (Generalization). For them, you probably could communicate directly in the token representation and you'd be better off. The actual language understanding for the LLM is probably very inefficent.
For human languages, I think there is opportunity here where you can build up intelligence on common reusable patterns and find places to optimize the usage, or break them down in a more cpu/readable way.
Re: I built a programming language using Claude Code
#168Earlier quoted context omitted.
Verbosity is an objective metric. Code readability is another, correlating one, but this is more subjective. To me go scores pretty low here - code flow would be readable were it not for the huge amount of noise you get from error "handling" (it is mostly just syntactic ceremony, often failing to properly handle the error case, and people are desensitized to these blocks so code review are more likely to miss these).…
Every time I hear complaints about error handling, I wonder if people have next to no try catch blocks or if they just do magic to hide that detail away in other languages? Because I still have to do error handling in other languages roughly the same? Am I missing something?
Exceptions travel up the stack on their own. Given that most error cases can't be handled immediately locally (otherwise it would be handled already and not return an error), but higher up (e.g. a web server deciding to return an error code) exceptions will save you a lot of boilerplate, you only have the throw at the source and the catch at the handler.
Meanwhile Go will have some boilerplate at every single level
Errors as values can be made ergonomic, there is the FP-heavy monadic solution with `do`, or just some macro like Rust. Go has none of these.
Re: I built a programming language using Claude Code
#169Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Impressive. As a practical matter, one wonders what th point would be in creating a new programming languages if the programmer no longer has to write or read code. I'm working on a language as well (hoping to debut by end of month), but the premise of the language is that it's designed like so: 1) It maximizes local reasoning and minimizes global complexity 2) It makes the vast majority of bugs / illegal states im…
How does a programming language prevent the vast majority of bugs? I feel like we would all be using that language!
How? That's easy. You just need a huge dollop of hubris.
Re: I built a programming language using Claude Code
#170Earlier quoted context omitted.
”I named it Cutlet after my cat. It’s completely legal to do that.” I’ve never seen LLM being able to produce these kind of absurdist jokes. Or any jokes, really.
comedy is a completely different thing than natural tone. I agree that they’re incapable of coming up with decent jokes
Agree. I keep asking LLMs to tell me some jokes from time to time, but never once I've found it's funny. For me, when I find myself burst out laughing from LLMs joke, I'd know we've reached AGI.