41–50 of 210 posts
It 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
I went looking for a single Markdown file I could dump into an LLM to "teach" it the language and found this one: https://github.com/jordanhubbard/nanolang/blob/main/MEMORY.m... Optimistically I dumped the whole thing into Claude Opus 4.5 as a system prompt to see if it could generate a one-shot program from it: llm -m claude-opus-4.5 \ -s https://raw.githubusercontent.com/jordanhubbard/nanolang/refs/heads/main/MEMOR…
# Control flow
if (> x 0) {
(println "positive")
} else {
(println "negative or zero")
}
# Gradient: " .:-=+*#%@"
let gradient: string = " .:-=+*#%@"
let gradient_len: int = 10
let idx: int = (/ (* iter gradient_len) max_iter)
if (>= idx gradient_len) {
return "@"
} else {
if (== idx 0) {
return " "
} else {
if (== idx 1) {
return "."
} else {
if (== idx 2) {
return ":"
} else {
if (== idx 3) {
return "-"
} else {
if (== idx 4) {
return "="
} else {
if (== idx 5) {
return "+"
} else {
if (== idx 6) {
return "*"
} else {
if (== idx 7) {
return "#"
} else {
if (== idx 8) {
return "%"
} else {
return "@"
}
}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…
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…
Thats again programming languages. Real issue with LLMs now is it doesn't matter if it can generate code quickly. Some one still has to read, verify and test it.
Perhaps we need a need a terse programming language. Which can be read quickly and verified. You could call that specification.
I went looking for a single Markdown file I could dump into an LLM to "teach" it the language and found this one: https://github.com/jordanhubbard/nanolang/blob/main/MEMORY.m... Optimistically I dumped the whole thing into Claude Opus 4.5 as a system prompt to see if it could generate a one-shot program from it: llm -m claude-opus-4.5 \ -s https://raw.githubusercontent.com/jordanhubbard/nanolang/refs/heads/main/MEMOR…
Oh, wow. I thought the control flow from the readme was a little annoying with the prefix -notation for bigger/smaller than; # Control flow if (> x 0) { (println "positive") } else { (println "negative or zero") } But that's nothing compared to the scream for a case/switch-statement in the Mandelbrot example... # Gradient: " .:-=+*#%@" let gradient: string = " .:-=+*#%@" let gradient_len: int = 10 let idx: int = (/ (…
I went looking for a single Markdown file I could dump into an LLM to "teach" it the language and found this one: https://github.com/jordanhubbard/nanolang/blob/main/MEMORY.m... Optimistically I dumped the whole thing into Claude Opus 4.5 as a system prompt to see if it could generate a one-shot program from it: llm -m claude-opus-4.5 \ -s https://raw.githubusercontent.com/jordanhubbard/nanolang/refs/heads/main/MEMOR…
But are you losing horsepower of the LLM available to problem solving on a given task by doing so?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Generally seems a bad idea to have your LLM write languages you do not understand or write yourself
Doesn’t that apply to the OP as well?
This seems like a research dead end to me, the fundamentals are not there
Isn'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.
LLM Code Generation - Unambiguous syntax reduces AI errors
Testing Discipline - Mandatory tests improve code quality
Simple & Fast - Minimal syntax, native performance
Design Philosophy:
Minimal syntax (18 keywords vs 32 in C)
One obvious way to do things
Tests are part of the language, not an afterthought
Transpile to C for maximum compatibility
ehh. i dont think the overhead of inventing a new language makes up for the lack of data around it. in fact if you're close enough to rust/c then llms are MORE likely to make up stuff from their training data and screw up your minimal language.
(pls argue against this, i want to be proven wrong)