Comment by rfgplk
14 hours ago
Controversial opinion, but new programming languages are desperately needed, _especially_ in the age of LLMs. Simply put, not all languages provide equal expressiveness, even if they're all Turing complete.
14 hours ago
Controversial opinion, but new programming languages are desperately needed, _especially_ in the age of LLMs. Simply put, not all languages provide equal expressiveness, even if they're all Turing complete.
Not only that, but the most important thing that a programming language does from an expressiveness perspective is define what your can't do. I often like to say that when there are an infinite number of programs you could write, programming is the act of narrowing that space until you're left with one program that you did write. Bugs are deviations from the one you were targeting, and a programming language can dramatically improve the process by eliminating a lot of the ones you don't want up front (ideally ones that might be easy to accidentally hit instead of your target)
This is why I think the "AI will just write machine code, so programming languages are done" opinion is wrong.
Having never heard someone claim that before, I honestly would have assumed someone saying that was joking, because it doesn't sound like it would work well at all!
2 replies →
that's not controversial to me. Programming languages that prioritize LLM creation/editing/reasons over it, while making it easy for humans to review and edit, but not being the primary author of the literal code.