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

I think this confuses two different things:

- LLMs can act as pseudocode to code translators (they are excellent at this)

- LLMs still create bugs and make errors, and a reasonable hypothesis is at a rate in direct proportion to the "complexity" or "buggedness" of the underlying language.

In other words, give an AI a footgun and it will happily use it unawares. That doesn't mean however it can't rapidly turn your pseudocode into code.

None of this means that LLMs can magically correct your pseudocode at all times if your logic is vastly wrong for your goal, but I do believe they'll benefit immensely from new languages that reduce the kind of bugs they make.

This is the moment we can create these languages. Because LLMs can optimize for things that humans can't, so it seems possible to design new languages to reduce bugs in ways that work for LLMs, but are less effective for people (due to syntax, ergonomics, verbosity, anything else).

This is crucially important. Why? Because 99% of all code written in the next two decades will be written by AI. And we will also produce 100x more code than has ever been written before (because the cost of doing it, has dropped essentially to zero). This means that, short of some revolutions in language technology, the number of bugs and vulnerabilities we can expect will also 100x.

That's why ideas like this are needed.

I believe in this too and am working on something also targeting LLMs specifically, and have been working on it since Mid to Late November last year. A business model will make such a language sustainable.

>It does lend itself better to "tokenization" of a sort - if you want to construct operations from lots of smaller operations [...]

That's an educated assumption to make. But therein lies the issue with every LLM "optimized" language, including those recent ones posted here oriented toward minimizing tokens. Assumptions, that are unvalidatable and unfalsifiable, about the kind of output LLMs synthesize/emit when that output is code (or any output to be real).

Every new language pet project these days claims to be "designed for LLM's", lol. Don't read too much into it. The only language that's really designed for LLM is COBOL, because it was written to read just like English natural language and LLM's are trained by reading lots of English language books.

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 series of instructions (like compilers), or say different "environmental factors" (e.g. the database or cloud provider that's available). It's as if the codebase itself is no longer the important artifact, the sequence of prompts is. You would also use this sequence of prompts to generate a testing suite completely independent of the codebase.

Thanks for all of the comments!

Quick reaction:

1. Nanolang is a total thought experiment. The key word its description is "experimental" - whether it's a Good experiment or a Bad experiment can be argued either way, especially by language purists!

2. Yes, it's a total Decorator Crab of a language. An unholy creation by Dr Frankenstein, yes! Those criticisms are entirely merited. It wasn't designed, it accreted features and was a fever dream I couldn't seem to stop having. I should probably take my own temperature.

3. I like prefix notation because my first calculator was an HP calculator (the HP 41C remains, to this day, my favorite calculator of ALL TIME). I won't apologize for that, but I DO get that it's not everybody's cup of tea! I do, however, use both vi and emacs now.

Umm. I think that about covers it. All of this LLM stuff is still incredibly young to me and I'm just firing a shotgun into the dark and listening to hear if I hit anything. It's going to be that way for a while for all of us until we figure out what works and what does not!

- jkh