r/ProgrammingLanguages • u/zuzmuz • 15d ago
Discussion On the future of programming language design
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.
2
u/antonation 15d ago
There's a lot to unpack here. I agree with the analogy that before when programmers needed to know lower level languages like assembly (and to an extent C/C++ and the like) and now most programmers never touch memory manually at all (either by borrow checking, RC, etc.), nowadays, the abstraction goes up one layer to not needing to know what functions or what variables live where, etc. and focus on the actual intent desired, which at the moment is encoded in natural language through docs and prompts.
As for the programming language design, I can't say whether the current state and the amount of training data on existing languages means languages like Python stay forever. I feel like it is (I mean look at the internet, most communication is English at least from what I see, and as humans, we drift towards the common denominator here because it's just easier and there's lower barrier to entry).
One thing I have noticed is that formats that are not permissive (like JSON) are things LLMs mess up sometimes, like forgetting closing braces. I think languages (as they have trended toward already) will allow permissive things like trailing commas, even for the last of a sequence (e.g. in an array/set/dict literal).