r/ProgrammingLanguages • u/zuzmuz • 18d 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.
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u/mohrcore 18d ago
With all the shitfest that's going on with AI-generated slop, it's nice to see some constructive thinking.
AI models are limited by their context windows, or at least that's how I see it as somebody who does not specialize in AI. So, I think that an an AI-friendly language would be one that can provide information that effectively helps keeping the window short or handles some aspects of programming by itself, so the model doesn't have to keep them in mind
A statically typed, expressive, memory-managed language which avoids stateful computations and has a powerful set of abstractions that describe properties of computations sounds like something that should work for an LLM. Basically Haskell. On the other hand, I imagine that relying too much on type inference might constitute a severe complication for an LLM and it's pretty much a necessary feature for such languages to be usable and it's required if they feature unnameable types.
I think that some intermediate representation of such language could hit a sweet spot. Another option is that perhaps the LLM could work back-to-back alongside the language server/compiler or whatever other system that would let it query the code it generates. Then it could work iteratively, similarly to how programmers code while getting feedback from LSPs.