It would be good to see evidence to support the claims:
NanoLang solves three problems:
LLM Code Generation - Unambiguous syntax reduces AI errors Testing Discipline - Mandatory tests improve code quality
particularly the first.
Nanolang: A tiny experimental language designed to be targeted by coding LLMs
171–180 of 210 posts
Re: Nanolang: A tiny experimental language designed to be targeted by coding LLMs
#172Earlier 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…
> 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 c…
I have had no issue with Claude writing code that uses lifetimes. It seems to be able to reason about them just fine.
I don't know what to say. May experience does not match yours.
Re: Nanolang: A tiny experimental language designed to be targeted by coding LLMs
#173Earlier 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…
> because the rust compiler and linters give such good feedback that it immediately fixes whatever goof it made. I still experience agents slipping in a `todo!` and other hacks to get code to compile, lint, and pass tests. The loop with tests and doc tests are really nice, agreed, but it'll still shit out bad code.
What agents, using what models?
Re: Nanolang: A tiny experimental language designed to be targeted by coding LLMs
#174Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
IMO, it's clarifying software development. I think ultimately it means that some people who are slightly on the softer side of development will become indistinguishable from other developers, and people on the more mechanical side of development will disappear.
If what you do can be done by the systematic manipulation of symbols, we have a better system for that now. If the spec they hand to you has to be so specific that you don't have to think while implementing it, we have a machine that can do everything except think that can handle that.
Re: Nanolang: A tiny experimental language designed to be targeted by coding LLMs
#175At 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…
What we need is a programming language that defines the diff to be applied upon the existing codebase to the same degree of unambiguity as the codebase itself. That is, in the same way that event sourcing materializes a state from a series of change events, this language needs to materialize a codebase from a series of "modification instructions". Different models may materialize a different codebase using the same s…
Unrelated, but I am literally listening to Rolandskvadet right now and reading your username was a trip
Re: Nanolang: A tiny experimental language designed to be targeted by coding LLMs
#176Earlier 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.
So you should have no problem bringing up the exact passages & equations they use for their policies.
Re: Nanolang: A tiny experimental language designed to be targeted by coding LLMs
#177Earlier 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.
well, that’s one way to react to being provided with interesting reading material.
Bring up passage that supports your claim. I'll wait.
Re: Nanolang: A tiny experimental language designed to be targeted by coding LLMs
#178Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you can generate code from the grammar then what exactly are you RLing? The point was to generate code in the first place so what does backpropagation get you here?
Post RL you won't need to put the grammar in the prompt anymore.
The grammar of this language is no more than a few hundred tokens (thousands at worst) & current LLMs support context windows in the millions of tokens.
Re: Nanolang: A tiny experimental language designed to be targeted by coding LLMs
#179Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
IMO, it's clarifying software development. I think ultimately it means that some people who are slightly on the softer side of development will become indistinguishable from other developers, and people on the more mechanical side of development will disappear. If what you do can be done by the systematic manipulation of symbols, we have a better system for that now. If the spec they hand to you has to be so specific…
> If the spec they hand to you has to be so specific that you don't have to think while implementing it
Does this exist in 2026? I feel like, at least in my bubble, expectations on individual developers has never been higher. I feel like the cut has already been made.
Re: Nanolang: A tiny experimental language designed to be targeted by coding LLMs
#180Earlier quoted context omitted.
I disagree I think we always need new languages. Every language over time becomes more and more unnecessarily complex. It's just part of the software lifecycle. People think their job is to "write code" and that means everything becomes more and more features, more abstractions, more complex, more "five different ways to do one thing". Many many examples, C++, Java esp circa 2000-2010 and on and on and on. There's no…
Related to your comment. I was a "desktop" developer many years ago (about 20). Back then I mainly coded in Assembler, Visual Basic, and Delphi, and I also learned COBOL, C, and Java. Just this week, I decided to start learning Kotlin because I want to build a mobile app. Everything was going great until I reached lambda functions. Honestly, I can't wrap my head around either their purpose or their syntax. I find the…
You know how to add logic on the outside of a function, by putting that function into a larger one and calling the function in the middle.
However, how do you inject logic INTO the middle of a function?
Say you have a function which can iterate over any list and given a condition do a filter. How do you inject the condition logic into that filter function?
In the C days you would use a function pointer for this. C++ introduced templating so you could do this regardless of type. Lambdas make the whole process more ergonomic, it's just declaring a one-shot function in place with some convenient syntax.
In rust instead of the full blown
fn filter_condition(val: ValType) -> bool { // logic }
I can declare a function in place with |val|{logic} - the lambda is just syntactic sugar to make your life easier.