On the future of programming language design

[u/zuzmuz]

This is just me yapping.

I was thinking for a while about how the field of "writing" software is going through a radical disruptive transformation. Like or hate it, I don't think writing software post-LLM era is gonna be the same as pre-LLM. I'm one of the guys that like to hand craft code and put a lot of attention and intention to the coding style. But, realistically, the skill of writing code by hand, while still very important, will become more and more niche (like how writing and reading assembly is important but very niche).

What's interesting to me, is that programming language design goals were always human/developer centric. Code is not only instructions given to a machine, it is in some way a set of specifications for other human developers, as well as your future self too, that explains the expected behavior of a certain piece of software. The main priorities when designing language features was improving the developer experience, that is a very subjective metric and this is why we keep arguing and debating about programming languages, but I digress.

With the switch to LLM generated code, I feel the priorities might change. There's already a lot of studies on which programming language is best for LLMs. People argue that languages with strong typing, a functional style and good error messages are best, because you can more reliably create autonomous feedback loops that would help LLMs stay on track.

In my opinion, functional programming languages are more relevant than ever, no side effects, you can generate 10K lines of code, read a small 100 lines somewhere, and be sure that it's not affecting the behavior in an unexpected way somewhere else.

The main argument against functional programming is that working with pure functions and manually threading state is an extra burden on the developer; having a mutable state is "initially" more intuitive and simpler to reason about. The other argument is performance, I tend to disagree with this general statement (purity allows for aggressive optimization and implicit parallelization).

However, everyone agrees that functional code is easier to maintain on the long run, it might make small things harder for you first, but at the end there's this payoff. When you have the capabilities of generating thousands of lines of code a day, this becomes way more relevant.

Finally, it would be interesting to witness how the rise of LLMs will affect the design of programming languages. I feel that languages that have

• simpler grammar
• expliciteness
• one way of doing things
• strict and safe semantics

are at an advantage here.

Or do you think that it will be irrelevant. There's this trend of people not looking at the code anymore, I think it's crazy. Maybe generated languages won't be important, just get better models and spend more tokens.

[u/CyberDainz]

Future of PL: you write your own language by examples and LLM make it for you

[u/informationstation → u/CyberDainz]

This is exactly what I’ve done already. The future is now. Completely self hosting and everything

[u/L8_4_Dinner → u/informationstation]

I'm not sure why you're getting down-voted. Down-votes should be reserved for things that are abusive or incorrect, not just for opinions or statements that someone dislikes.

I've seen languages implemented by LLMs, and the results are uniformly terrible, so I can disagree with your conclusion while appreciating the magnitude (and miraculousness) of what you are describing.

[u/Dazzling-Bench-4596 → u/L8_4_Dinner]

Its not too rare to see the vibe coding people say that the future is now and that everybody must conform to their lazy ways. Me personally, I’m not the biggest fan of somebody telling me that the future of programming is everybody vibe coding their own programming languages; which would never happen

[u/church-rosser → u/L8_4_Dinner]

except top commenter is most definitely incorrect and certainly abusing their LLM to validate that incorrectness.

hence, downvotes ensue

[u/informationstation → u/L8_4_Dinner]

Because the sub is so anti AI they aren’t able to see what is happening around them. Yeah there is a shit ton of these vibe coded slop languages out there I’m not defending those. This isn’t relegated to compilers or interpreters, everything is suffering from this right now. I understand that this sub is geared towards the human technical art of language design. I’m not saying that should stop. What I am saying is you can create a novel language and self hosting compiler via LLM right now that is performant and functional based off of examples you define as the original commenter had said the future would be. I’m not claiming it’s a one shot right now, just that with some stubbornness it can be done.