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

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

#71

Post by ekidd »

root_axis wrote: post #37
adastra22 wrote: post #30

Earlier 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…

> 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.

Yeah, I have zero problem getting Opus 4.5 to write high-quality Rust code. And I'm picky.

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

#72

Post by nl »

Zigurd wrote: post #19
thorum wrote: post #6

Developed 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.

It's not just how well the language is represented. Obscure-ish APIs can trip up LLMs. I've been using Antigravity for a Flutter project that uses ATProto. Gemini is very strong at Dart coding, which makes picking up my 17th managed language a breeze. It's also very good at Flutter UI elements. It was noticeably less good at ATProto and its Dart API. The characteristics of failures have been interesting: As I anticip…

I have a vibe coded fantasy console. Getting Doom running on it was easy.

Getting the Doom sound working on it involved me setting there typing "No I can't hear anything" over and over until it magically worked...

Maybe I should have written a helper program to listen using the microphone or something.

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

#73

Post by nl »

measurablefunc wrote: post #11
whimsicalism wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

easy enough to solve with RL probably

There is no RL for programming languages. Especially ones w/ no significant amount of code.

I guess the op was implying that is something fixable fairly easily?

(Which is true - it's easy to prompt your LLM with the language grammar, have it generate code and then RL on that)

Easy in the sense of "it is only having enough GPUs to RL a coding capable LLM" anyway.

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

#74

Post by adastra22 »

roncesvalles wrote: post #68
deepsquirrelnet wrote: post #25

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…

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…

[flagged]

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

#75

Post by kamaal »

deepsquirrelnet wrote: post #56
kamaal wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>new ways to create specifications. 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.

Yes, essentially a higher level programming language than what we currently have. A programming language that doesn't have strict syntax, and can be expressed with words or code. And like any other programming language, it includes specifications for the tests and expectations of the result. The programming language can look more like code in parts where the specification needs to be very detailed. I think people can…

Simply put whatever you write should produce the same output regardless of how many times you execute it. The more verbose you make it, the more pointless it becomes.

More terse the better.

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

#78

Post by measurablefunc »

nl wrote: post #73
measurablefunc wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no RL for programming languages. Especially ones w/ no significant amount of code.

I guess the op was implying that is something fixable fairly easily? (Which is true - it's easy to prompt your LLM with the language grammar, have it generate code and then RL on that) Easy in the sense of "it is only having enough GPUs to RL a coding capable LLM" anyway.

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?

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

#79

Post by jasfi »

deepsquirrelnet wrote: post #25

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…

I'm actually building this, will release it early next month. I've added a URL to watch to my profile (should be up later this week). It will be Open Source.

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

#80

Post by avereveard »

deepsquirrelnet wrote: post #25

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…

llm works great in closed loop so they can self correct but we don't have a reliable way to lint and test specs we need a new language for that
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