Seems like a simplified Rust with partial prefix notation (which the rationale that is better for LLMs is based on vibes really) that compiles to C. Similar language posted here not too long ago: Zen-C => more features, no prefix notation / Rue => no prefix notation, compiles directly to native code (no C target). Surprisingly compared to other LLM "optimized" languages, it isn't so much concerned about token efficiency.
Nanolang: A tiny experimental language designed to be targeted by coding LLMs
31–40 of 210 posts
Re: Nanolang: A tiny experimental language designed to be targeted by coding LLMs
#32Isn't this essentially just WebAssembly or Lisp?
Re: Nanolang: A tiny experimental language designed to be targeted by coding LLMs
#33Seems like a simplified Rust with partial prefix notation (which the rationale that is better for LLMs is based on vibes really) that compiles to C. Similar language posted here not too long ago: Zen-C => more features, no prefix notation / Rue => no prefix notation, compiles directly to native code (no C target). Surprisingly compared to other LLM "optimized" languages, it isn't so much concerned about token efficie…
I find Polish or Reverse Polish notation jarring after a lifetime of thinking in terms of operator precedence. Given that it's fairly rare to see, I wonder what about it would be more LLM-friendly. It does lend itself better to "tokenization" of a sort - if you want to construct operations from lots of smaller operations, for example if you're mutating genetic algorithms (a la Eureqa). But I've written code in the past to explicitly convert those kinds of operations back to infix for easier readability. I wonder if the LLMs in this case are expected to behave a bit like genetic algorithms as they construct things.
Re: Nanolang: A tiny experimental language designed to be targeted by coding LLMs
#34It seems that something that does away with human friendly syntax and leans more towards a pure AST representation would be even better? Basically a Lisp but with very strict typing might do the trick. And most LLMs are probably trained on lots of Lisps already.
Generally seems a bad idea to have your LLM write languages you do not understand or write yourself
Re: Nanolang: A tiny experimental language designed to be targeted by coding LLMs
#35Isn't this essentially just WebAssembly or Lisp?
It looks like a Frankenstein's abomination that has c-like function signatures and structs with Sexpr function bodies and this will anger some homomorphism nerds. I love it.
Re: Nanolang: A tiny experimental language designed to be targeted by coding LLMs
#36Why did you pick shadow as a keyword for a testing block?
Re: Nanolang: A tiny experimental language designed to be targeted by coding LLMs
#37Developed 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…
> 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 isn't even true today. Source: heavy user of claude code and gemini with rust for almost 2 years now.
Re: Nanolang: A tiny experimental language designed to be targeted by coding LLMs
#38This is kinda frustrating, docs are LLM generated, no explanation or justification for how this was designed to be targeted for LLMs.
Re: Nanolang: A tiny experimental language designed to be targeted by coding LLMs
#39At 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…
And so it comes full circle XD.
Re: Nanolang: A tiny experimental language designed to be targeted by coding LLMs
#40Really clean language where the design decisions have led to fewer traps (cond is a good choice). It’s peculiar to see s-expressions mixed together with imperative style. I’ve been experimenting along similar lines - mixing s-expressions with ML style in the same dialect (for a project). Having an agentic partner toiling away with the lexer/parser/implementation details is truly liberating. It frees the human to expl…
I had the same reaction to seeing S-expressions, but my conclusion was that this should just be a lisp. Why stop just at operators?