Comment by reitzensteinm

7 hours ago

LLMs are also very good at writing code for newly invented languages, especially if they can execute it and iterate. I strongly believe the barrier to switch languages is lowered in a post LLM world.

Ten years ago I was at a startup where we used Datomic, and it was okay, but six months in the sales team was like “ok how do I run SQL queries so I can triage leads”. We had no answer of course.

Today it would simply be: type what you want in natural language and we’ll generate the query with Claude.

I just tried one representative query from that startup against a hypothetical datalog query tool in Rust and it did just fine.

I agree that an LLM could also generate the code for a new query language. But my point is that fewer people will attempt to author a new query language in the first place because an LLM will be writing the queries either way. So the effort would be less impactful.

  • You're right, I was talking past you.

    I have an implicit belief that SQL isn't the most effective low level language we could have and LLMs will free us up to explore that space, similar to asm.js -> WASM. But I'm open to being wrong about that.