Comment by leshow
3 days ago
I don't think that's a fair comparison. Type systems don't produce probabilistic output. Their entire purpose is to reduce the scope of possible errors you can write. They kind of did change the world, didn't they? I mean, not everyone is writing Haskell but Rust exists and it's doing pretty well. There was also not really a case to be made where type systems made software in general _worse_. But you could definitely make the case that LLM's might make software worse.
That probabilistic output has to be symbolically constrained - SQL/JSON/other code is generated through syntax constrained beam search.
You brought up Rust, it is fascinating.
The Rust's type system differs from typical Hindle-Milner by having operations that can remove definitions from environment of the scope.
Rust was conceived in 2006.
In 2006 there already were HList papers by Oleg Kiselyov [1] that had shown how to keep type level key-value lists with addition, removal and lookup, and type-level stateful operations like in [2] were already possible, albeit, most probably, not with nice monadic syntax support.
It was entirely possible to have prototype Rust to be embedded into Haskell and have borrow checker implemented as type-level manipulation over double parameterized state monad.
But it was not, Rust was not embedded into Haskell and now it will never get effects (even as weak as monad transformers) and, as a consequence, will never get proper high performance software transactional memory.
So here we are: everything in Haskell's strong type system world that would make Rust better was there at the very beginning of the Rust journey, but had no impact on Rust.
Rhyme that with LLM.
Its too bad the management people never pushed Haskell as hard as they're pushing AI today! Alas.