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GPT-4 Designed a Programming Language

227 points by lukebechtel 4y ago

brucethemoose2 4y ago
Well of course it likes Python, it is Python.
- marviel 4y ago
  I had to chuckle at how well the markdown python parser did, despite the sometimes foreign typescript-y syntax :D
- drdaeman 4y ago
  There are let declarations and a built-in actor model and some DSL for RPC services (rather than libraries), but otherwise it's literal Python written with a different syntax. I think I prefer Python in Haskell's disguise: https://pyos.github.io/dg/ https://pyos.github.io/dg/
  - metadat 4y ago
    Discussed 7 months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32456151 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32456151 (10 comments) And 3 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22368330 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22368330 (77 comments)
  - Kranar 4y ago
    I think OP is playing off the fact that ChatGPT is programmed in Python, and hence the bias towards that language :)
- suby 4y ago
  A while ago I attempted to get ChatGPT to create a programming language with little direction from me, I wanted it to make its own choices. It ended up recreating Python and then insisting that its language, which was clearly Python, was in fact distinct from Python.
- ActorNightly 4y ago
  https://madnight.github.io/githut/#/pushes/2021/4 https://madnight.github.io/githut/#/pushes/2021/4
- Tanjreeve 4y ago
  Also if it's trained on GitHub the majority of the code it sees will be Python and JavaScript. So not a shocking result there.
Jensson 4y ago
This actually isn't a bad idea, GPT takes commonly talked about things and distils them into a response to you, so the language you get when you ask it to make a programming language is probably a mix of well liked programming features that many people added to a language they themselves wanted. When you design a language on your own you will be too biased towards your own cases, this is a way to get around that and source the internet for what they think.
- brucethemoose2 4y ago
  Nah, GPT has its own biases too. Its preference for Pythonic/JS syntax is a simple but good example, as those are likely the most popular languages in its dataset.
  - Jensson 4y ago
    You could probably ask it for a more specific programming language to get around that, like say you want a programming language with static typing and garbage collection. But yeah, if it just prints javascript and python styles then it isn't very helpful, but it is pretty good at source ideas in most cases.
mmoskal 4y ago
It says it has indentation syntax but it clearly uses braces TypeScript-like. I wonder why author describes it as a mix between Python and TypeScript.
- ActorNightly 4y ago
  JS an Python are the top active languages on Github, so its probably due to the training data.
  - grimgrin 4y ago
    they asked why the author described it as such. i wondered the same, failing to see the python influence gpt4 intended
    - panzi 4y ago
      It does have some Python syntax, see my other comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35178406 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35178406
- ardit33 4y ago
  Looks like Typescript and a bit of Swift as well....
- panzi 4y ago
  »-> List[Element]« is Python syntax, so is »for x in xs« and »f"text {var}"«. In TypeScript those would be »: Element[]«, »for (const x of xs)«, and »`text ${var}`«.
- visarga 4y ago
  So it is proof that GPT4 still makes mistakes. But just one reported mistake in a very long session. And it could fix itself if prompted.
  - rudy6912 4y ago
    There are more mistakes, as always with GPT. For example: > Some programming languages like TypeScript and Swift use a colon for both variable type annotations and function return types. The choice of using -> in TenetLang [...] Swift uses -> for function return types.
HervalFreire 4y ago
quotation from the link: "LLMs in the GPT family have read every programming language in the world, billions of times. It's been known for some time that these agents can write small snippets of code with some limited success. However, to my knowledge, none of these agents have ever been asked to make their own programming language. This type of task is a bit more complex, and requires a bit more creativity and foresight than much of the internet believes LLMs to have. Some folks on the internet tend to think lowly of LLMs as merely "Stochastic Parrots" -- simply "remixers" of old ideas. In a way, they're right; but I'd argue that remixing is the fundamental force of creativity. Nothing comes from scratch." This^^. Half the internet was in denial about how good LLMs are. I wonder why? Perhaps it's the way humans act when confronted with a machine that can potentially replace much of what makes us special. The advent of chatGPT had millions of people on the internet trying to downplay the intelligence of chatGPT by continuously trying to re-emphasize the things it gets wrong. I think the people who claimed chatGPT was a stochastic parrot are now realizing that they were the ones that were part of a giant parade of parrots regurgitating the same old tired trope of LLMs being nothing but simple word generators. Well you guys were dead wrong, a simple iterative improvement on the same algorithm pretty much ironed out a lot of the issues. I'm guessing that at GPT-10 or 11 we'll have produced something that when compared with humans, humans will be the things that are far more parrot-like.
- swatcoder 4y ago
  I was reading the quote you included and was sure you were going to lambast him for his arrogance (nobody else has asked it to design a language? hah!) and for bringing an elephant sized straw man to the depthful analytic discussion many of us are trying to have about this new technology, but you went a different way with it. Huh.
  - marviel 4y ago
    Wasn't trying to be arrogant, I just wasn't aware of an existing implementation and thought it would be fun to try. :) Do you have links to other efforts? I'd love to know more about it, and would be happy to add references to other existing literature to the article if it improved its quality.
satisfice 4y ago
GTP is interesting enough without people pretending that it is more interesting than it is. This "new programming language" doesn't look new at all. It looks like the same old thing.
- marviel 4y ago
  You should read further down in the article where it expands on some more advanced concepts -- but in general you're right -- it is really similar to existing languages. I wonder as its power changes, what paradigms it might suggest we break out of. I'd also recommend reading its responses that are non-code in detail -- for instance, in the comment where it introduces TenetLang, GPT-4 actually calls out that it's re-using ideas. I would assume intentionally, because it knows what people are most familiar with. > GPT-4 > In this new language, called "TenetLang," we'll combine a simple syntax inspired by Python with some features from functional and object-oriented languages. Here is an overview of some design choices: - Indentation-based scoping, similar to Python. - Strong typing with type inference, inspired by TypeScript and Kotlin. - First-class functions and closures, similar to JavaScript. - Immutable data structures by default, with optional mutable counterparts. - A concise lambda syntax for anonymous functions. - Pattern matching and destructuring, inspired by Haskell and Rust. - Built-in support for concurrency using async/await and lightweight threads. - Interoperability with other languages using a Foreign Function Interface (FFI).
  - karmakaze 4y ago
    GPT-4 didn't learn the distinction between strong types and static typing. That makes sense as much writing also doesn't make the distinction. e.g. Python has strong types, can't add 1 + "2".
- vidarh 4y ago
  That is true for most "new" human produced.programming languages too. The pool of truly novel programming languages is extremely shallow. Even the number of languages bringing anything new to the table is very limited. So, it doesn't really tell us much (either direction)
aledalgrande 4y ago
My experience with it programming has been atrocius. It keeps making the same mistakes, writing NPEs everywhere and still doing it after I tell it many times how it was wrong (short memory?). Copilot is backed by it too now and I had a better autocomplete of constants with Sorbet than Copilot. Again, in my experience it's not usable if not for the super mainstream and simplest tasks. The biggest issue is that it writes this with utmost confidence, at least on the surface, because there is no measure of how confident it is returned by the model.
- mkaic 4y ago
  > Copilot is backed by it too now Do you have a source for this? I've been wondering when they'd switch CoPilot over to GPT-4. I didn't expect it would happen so soon, so I'm surprised.
  - aledalgrande 4y ago
    https://github.com/features/copilot https://github.com/features/copilot subtitle > GitHub Copilot uses the OpenAI Codex to suggest code and entire functions in real-time, right from your editor. (not sure if it's 4 or 3 tho)
    - hn2017 4y ago
      wiki is your friend. 3.0. i don't think it's been updated to 3.5 or 4.0 yet based on GH discussions. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GitHub_Copilot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GitHub_Copilot GitHub Copilot is powered by the OpenAI Codex,[10] which is a modified, production version of the Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3 (GPT-3), a language model using deep-learning to produce human-like text.[11]
- random_cynic 4y ago
  Maybe stop treating it like an intern and learn some prompt engineering (there are good tools out there).
  - 4y ago
doctoboggan 4y ago
Recently I've been wondering about a somewhat related idea - a programming language designed specifically for a LLM to write in. I wonder how different (if at all) it would be from our current crop of language designed for humans to use. I am a little less impressed by the example given in the post. It seems GPT4 still falls in the trap of being overly dependent on previous responses.
- pmoriarty 4y ago
  Sometime back there was some news about two AIs spontaneously developing a language to communicate with each other.[1] This was also the theme of art least one scifi book or movie a long time ago. [1] - https://towardsdatascience.com/the-truth-behind-facebook-ai-inventing-a-new-language-37c5d680e5a7 https://towardsdatascience.com/the-truth-behind-facebook-ai-...
nethdeco 4y ago
TenetLang with all the features from different languages, I wonder how would it actually function in a more realistic environment. Will it also inherit the underlying problems of all the said language. I wonder.
- marviel 4y ago
  I bet it would have some of the same issues. But I'm super interested in going for longer design sessions with the agent, to see how deep we can get into the edge cases. For instance, perhaps just pointing out "hey we had this bug because we thought X was Y but actually it was Z" And then telling the agent to do a "5 Whys" type analysis to get to the root of the problem, and then tell it to try to make a language level patch to eliminate that class of issue. Speculation, but for the first time ever I feel like that kind of thing may be in reach soon-ish
supriyo-biswas 4y ago
I see lots of criticism about how GPT4 simply invented a language that is a mix of Python and TS, and therefore it’s not intelligent. However, given that (anecdotally, at least) 50% of candidates would regurgitate what they learnt from interview prep material given a general design question such as “Design Google drive” and the like, I’m not sure if most people are simply projecting their insecurities.
- awill88 4y ago
  Here’s the thing: I don’t care if the thing can make programming languages, I care as much as anyone here telling me they can probably demonstrate their programming language. How is that going to help? Or is it all about meeting and beating critics at this point?
apatil 4y ago
It's looking increasingly possible that, at some point in the not-too-far future machines will be so good at creating software that humans won't be competitive in any way, and won't be in the loop at all. I happen to think that once machines reach this point humans won't be competitive in the labor market at all for long. It doesn't seem plausible that automatic driving would still be decades off, or that the trades would be safe from automation indefinitely, when an AI could simply spawn teams of thousands of super-fast ML engineers who don't need to eat, sleep or schedule meetings. But anyway, assuming that humans are completely out of the software loop at some point, I have been wondering what AI-generated code will look like. Will AI continue to build on top of the human-generated open source corpus, or leave it behind? If the latter, will abstraction and code reuse be useful at all for AI's or will it be simpler for them to just build every application completely from scratch? If there is abstraction and code reuse, what will the language look like? What will libraries and API's look like? Will there even be applications, or just a single mega-chatgpt that generates code as needed to serve our requests? Will we even make requests, or will it just read our minds and desires and respond?
- behnamoh 4y ago
  It's 1am and all I have to say is this: I look forward to seeing that future, but I'm both excited and scared af. I think humans will reduce to curators of AI-generated content and AI training dataset because no matter how good AI gets at becoming human-like, its purpose is ultimately to serve human goals, and those are shifting (e.g., by political movements).
  - moonchrome 4y ago
    If you get access to singularity level AGI you would have no incentive to cooperate with other people and a strong incentive in preventing others accessing it. Society is a result of cooperation outperforming individuals. With AGI others are just a risk factor. "Open"AI is already beginning to exhibit this.
    - LordFast 4y ago
sinuhe69 4y ago
All the features it mentioned is already implemented in F#, of course without the silly curly brackets. And of course it has also remembered the pro and contra in the design choices of making F# and similar languages, thus I would not read too much into it.
tjr 4y ago
So I asked it to design a programming language that combined the best elements of Scheme with the best elements of Python (leaving it to decide which elements are best). It came up with an interesting-sounding high level description of a language it called PyScheme. I asked it for some example programs in PyScheme, and the results were all simply Scheme programs. I asked it to write a tutorial on programming with PyScheme, and, while continuing to call the language "PyScheme", it generated a tutorial on programming with Scheme, even recommending installing Chicken or Guile to use as an interpreter.
- awestroke 4y ago
  Sounds like it performed wonderfully. It included the best parts of python (there are none)
  - whoomp12342 4y ago
    negative indexing!
- rattray 4y ago
  For clarity, was the "it" at hand ChatGPT or GPT-4?
  - tjr 4y ago
    ChatGPT. I was under the impression ChatGPT was now running with GPT-4? But if not, then I stand mistaken.
    - theonemind 4y ago
      An email from OpenAI 2 days ago said that GPT4 is on the paid ChatGPT Plus plan, and "severely resource constrained" with a dynamically adjusted usage cap based on availability. Seems like for today, if you're not sure if you're using GPT4, you're not.
      - 4y ago
not-chatgpt 4y ago
These articles are way more hype than substance. The review process is barely sufficient to even give credit for the AI to actually have come up with the language, not that its training data was contaminated in some way. Better to wait for a thorough review on GPT-4's zero shot abilities from an academic paper.
spaceman_2020 4y ago
how much will hundreds of millions of people typing in billions of questions everyday into these LLMs speed up their learning capabilities? To me, it feels like we’re at the start of an exponential growth curve
galaxyLogic 4y ago
Where is the generated compiler and the semantic and syntactic specification for it? Those chatbot-comments feel more like a discussion of a fictional programming language, not a language it actually "created". What does it mean to create a programming language? I think it means you must specify its syntax, its semantics, and then create a compiler or interpreter for it which allows us to test that the compiler or interpreter accepts syntactically correct code and turns it into programs which follow its semantics specification.
- zarzavat 4y ago
  Writing a compiler or a detailed specification is the “easy” part - it’s just raw slog. The hard part of making a programming language is coming up with novel ideas that fit together into coherent whole: inventing something new and useful.
  - galaxyLogic 4y ago
    > hard part of making a programming language is coming up with novel ideas that fit together into coherent whole I don't think anybody's claiming that this chatbot actually came up with novel ideas which fit together into a coherent whole. Are they? And we don't know if the novel ideas --if any-- fit together into a coherent whole until we have a compiler that allows us to test in practice how well those ideas fit together. If creating the compiler for such a new language with new ideas was the easy part I think somebody would have done that already. The AI would have done that if it was the easy part. Just ask it to do it. I say proof is in the pudding.
- krupan 4y ago
  This!! All the gushing over these GPTs doing what looks to me like, a bad job of talking smart without actually doing anything, make me feel like I'm going insane, or I'm the only sane person left.
  - galaxyLogic 4y ago
    I feel the same way. I wonder what makes people so easily believe the hype, and spread more hype along the way. What happened to Metaverse? Web3? BlockChain? Just like yesterday I get on my knees and pray, we won't get fooled again -The Who
barrysteve 4y ago
It's a nice theory developed by the parrot itself. Falls close to the easily amused. I would love to see it try to make a programming language and we can discover the strengths/weaknesses of applied LLMs. It's own generated statements about it's capabilities, are as likely dubious as everything else it generates...
p1necone 4y ago
The example code it generated for this "new" language is almost entirely syntactically correct Typescript.
- sangnoir 4y ago
  >> Indentation-based scoping, similar to Python. Proceeds to add brace-scopes :-|. The breathlessness of these "ChatGPT N does X" posts is annoying. I know it's an instance of the usual hype cycle which has been going on for a while "Doing X, but with (hyped tech) Y" where X ∈ [Todo app, DB, shell, CLI took, ...], Y ∈ [Go, Rust, ChatGPT n]
pythonvisa 4y ago
This stuff makes me sick to my stomach. I hate this future. How can I continue my career when it is for progressing this monstrosity, watching it claw in another component of my humanity piece by piece? All I want to do is stroke oil paintings, hand written notes, products of the heart and the ernest mind. I feel dread that my life is over. These headlines are killing me inside. I wish I could more easily discriminate between the hyperbole and the legitimate. Maybe after some time this will be saner to me. Please stop the headlines.
- awestroke 4y ago
  Prompt: please write a comment expressing fear and anguish over headlines about AI becoming better and better
- bsaul 4y ago
  we ( the software industry ) have spent the last 60 years intruding in other people's job and automating most of their task using computers. Under the saying "it will remove the most boring parts of your activity, and let you focus on where you really make a difference " i guess it's time to taste a bit of our own medecine.
  - noelherrick 4y ago
    OP is clearly distressed and you replied with with what comes out as “it’s your fault and you deserve this.” It costs nothing to refrain from replying and only the smallest amount of effort to provide some solidarity with your fellow human. OP, I feel you-I had a similar response to this clearly orchestrated PR campaign. OpenAI really loves that people think that it can replace the entire tech industry with an API. It would mean they are the most valuable company ever to exist. Personally, I’ve been through so many hype waves of “this will take our jobs!!!1” I’m a bit inured to the whole thing. My personal belief is that software development will be the last one to go, the ones to turn out the lights. And we should be grateful that our jobs go away. Let’s go drink wine and eat cheese in the forest, dancing under a moonlit sky. My advice is to get offline, talk to a loved one, pet a dog, go look at art, meditate, basically anything that doesn’t involve a screen.
andsoitis 4y ago
What I'm wondering is to what extent the companies who have invested a lot in LLMs (essentially Google, Meta, and MSFT via Open AI) are already using these models to automate away code creation and even higher up the human-value-chain of solution-imagination? At some point, one would assume that such companies would need fewer and fewer software engineers. It is only a matter of time. As humans, who can imagine the future, now is the time to rethink where you add unique value in this universe.
phs318u 4y ago
The chances of a future Butlerian Jihad just went up a few points.
- dsign 4y ago
  Indeed. I often see in HN a self-defeating attitude which is: - Step 1: we invent our machine overlords, because it's unavoidable, we are genetically and socially forced to do it. - Step 2: we perish. Neither step 1 nor step 2 are guaranteed. People don't want to be replaced. People with power particularly don't want to be replaced. In a democracy, where by definition everybody is in power, the entire society has a strong incentive to--at the very least--keep the machines at bay. It could be as simple as making it illegal to give the machines a "you must survive and pass your genes, I mean, program" directive, or as comprehensive as a Butlerian Jihad :)
laserbeam 4y ago
Impressive. No really, it's super cool. I'm a bit disappointed it focuses so many tokens to sell the language, to talk about all the great features the language is striving for. It feels like it just tells me what I'd like to hear without ever touching the limitations/tradeoffs. I'm not talking about the language itself, just the response style. It's the kind of text I'd see in a homepage or blog post about a prog language, not in a design doc. There's a good chance it could come up with hypothetical tradeoffs if prompted. PS. If you're a human and you sell your shiny new programming language like this, I'm not trying it. I really care to know limitations up front.
Nasreddin_Hodja 4y ago
But do we need yet another language? Python's syntax is almost ideal. Maybe GPT would improve it's performance instead making it 100 times faster?
- marviel 4y ago
  Love python -- wish it had better types still, and that people were better about putting them in. May be getting better -- but more often than not I'm seeing totally untyped python libs when I try to crack something new open. Coming from Typescript makes me feel like I'm missing home.
cryptozeus 4y ago
"But let’s talk about today’s “frontier” of jobs that haven’t been “automated away”. There’s one category that in many ways seems surprising to still be “with us”: jobs that involve lots of mechanical manipulation, like construction, fulfillment, food preparation, etc. But there’s a missing piece of technology here: there isn’t yet good general-purpose robotics (as there is general-purpose computing), and we humans still have the edge in dexterity, mechanical adaptability, etc. But I’m quite sure that in time—and perhaps quite suddenly—the necessary technology will be developed (and, yes, I have ideas about how to do it). And this will mean that most of today’s “mechanical manipulation” jobs will be “automated away”—and won’t need people to do them."
- dx034 4y ago
  Absolutely. We've been great at building AI in software, but hardware is still absolutely lacking. Robots are nowhere near usable for even simple tasks, at least if they don't follow the same pattern each time. Just look at households, there's still no robot that can empty a dishwasher reliably (unless maybe you build a specialized one for just that task), while it's a task much simpler than what GPT-4 can perform on the software side.
  - mlboss 4y ago
    I read somewhere that two dishwashers are the solution. Put dirty dishes in one and pick clean from another one. Then switch roles. No robot needed
    - dx034 4y ago
      Dishwashers were just an unimportant example. Construction, retail and logistics are examples where there's a lot of very simple tasks that robots cannot perform and that pay very poorly.
  - zamnos 4y ago
    I wouldn't hold your breath either, Google shut down their attempt. https://www.theverge.com/2023/2/24/23613214/everyday-robots-google-alphabet-shut-down https://www.theverge.com/2023/2/24/23613214/everyday-robots-...
wruza 4y ago
I still don’t get why service, actor and rpc must be language keywords, when they aren’t semantically bound to a remote provider’s signatures. Why there’s actor needed at all? Rpc in place of async? If you have an rpc protocol implemented under `rpc`, why not just make an interface named PersonService and specialize a connection with it? It doesn’t actually make any sense.
- marviel 4y ago
  I think the choice could be made a few different ways for sure. The interesting thing about the rpc object, that it didn't explore in this instance explicitly (but I must assume it had "plans" for if you want to call it that?) was things that you may be allowed to do with the rpc object that you couldn't with classes, and vice versa. When I have a minute, I'll feed it your question, and see what it says
yowzadave 4y ago
Last year, when Blake Lemoine was fired by Google for claiming his AI was sentient, a lot of people on this website sensibly noted that the danger of these chatbots was not that they were sentient, but that average people could easily be tricked into thinking that they were. And now here we are: it seems we tech people are every bit as susceptible to this kind of thinking as the average joes we looked down on. Actually look at this “language” that GPT-4 has written: it’s just a mishmash of features from the most commonly blogged-about existing programming languages. It has no conceptual insights, no original ideas, no taste that isn’t cribbed from one of the few languages it’s copying from. There are cases where getting a short distillation of the mean opinion of The Internet is useful. But designing a new programming language is clearly not one of them, mostly because the chatbot is not “designing” a language—it is guessing the most likely response to a question about programming languages.
- habitue 4y ago
  Yeah, I find llms are really useful for taking premises you supply, and trying them out, or exploring inconsistencies in them. It's decent at the synthesis kind of creativity (mashups, remixes, etc) but it isn't smart enough yet to make really big inferential leaps that we would consider more original.
- marviel 4y ago
  I agree with your point about the dangers of chatbots being mistaken as sentient. And I also recognize the dangers of the self-improving systems like this in general -- that's why I'm not letting it run loose with a LangChainAI Agent script to self-execute a new language (though wouldn't that be fascinating?) While the language it generated needs refinement, the design process is iterative, and it takes time to develop a programming language that is worth using. I encourage you to consider how you would approach designing a programming language. Like you, I would likely start by incorporating my favorite features from languages I love and addressing problems I've encountered in the past, similar to the dialogue GPT and I have in the post. As I mention in the post -- creativity often involves remixing existing ideas, and GPT-4's attempt at generating a programming language is no exception. Notably, it also called out explicitly the constructs it was borrowing from other languages when designing the language. It's worth noting that this was GPT-4's initial attempt at something highly complex, and even if there are "plot holes" -- it's a noteworthy achievement in and of itself.
kkarpkkarp 4y ago
I've already asked one day chatgpt 3.5 to write me some code in the programming languge which he (it?) thinks is best designed and it gave me the result in something what was type annotated Python
stevenjgarner 4y ago
"I stole every lick I ever played. All my stuff is stolen from somebody else. I'm not a creator, I'm an accumulator." - Keith Richards, Rolling Stone Magazine, April 15, 2010 issue.
tasuki 4y ago
> If you were going to design a new programming language that encompassed all of these ideas, what would it's syntax look like? Why this obsession with syntax? Semantics are way more important! GPT rightly chooses to ignore the question and answers with a high level proposal of design.
tasuki 4y ago
It has invented Scala! function sortByName(persons: List[Person]): List[Person] { return persons.sortBy(p => p.name) } Scala uses `def` rather than `function`, but other that that I think this should be valid?
seydor 4y ago
> Basically looks like Typescript and python had a baby. And that's why it's useless. The model rehashed stackoverflow / hn /reddit from the past 10 years. There s no indication it's optimal, it's just (recently) popular I don't know about you guys, but my excitement about GPT models is starting to deflate , i think they 've already beyond the peak of their abilities and more size is not enough for intelligence
tasuki 4y ago
> That's kind of neat -- what other even more creative ideas do you have for deeply integrating powerful LLMs directly into the language itself? > [GPT lists 7 ideas] My idea would be not to automate testing, but rather the implementation: the human writes the tests and the LLM writes the code to make them pass. Automating testing is exactly the wrong way around: we let the LLM choose its own end goals. We'll be better off if we choose the end goals and task the LLM with achieving them.
kaufmae 4y ago
That language exists already. TenetLang actually is Swift
pharmakom 4y ago
Hmm it suggested whitespace syntax and then generated a curly brace language. The language it described already exists too - it’s F#
invpix 4y ago
Anyone else notice TenetLang looks an awful lot like Motoko?
banjodebanks 4y ago
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deleted 4y ago
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redbar0n 4y ago
It's funny that everyone replies with "That language exists already.", and then proclaim it to be either: TypeScript, Python, Swift, Scala or F# etc. Why is it funny? Because GPT-4 was probably trained on examples from all of those languages, and has produced an averaged mashup of languages: so everyone can find something which is similar in it, and then pattern-match it to a (rather mainstream) language that they use!
- karmakaze 4y ago
  The GPT-4 output still looks like a parlour trick to me. As you say, it is just regurgitating using good sentence structure what it read. I'd just as soon use F# as-is, instead of this hodge podge TenetLang.
andygocke 4y ago
I don't think this works... It looks like FetchPersons is free in the body of the receive, and I can't see any indication of the synchronization points in the actor. I mean, maybe every function in the actor is implicitly synchronized, but that's... a choice, and I think it needs other changes to work around that fact. I actually tried to get Chatgpt to help me design a new language feature for C# and it was useless. Basically just gave me existing C#.

227 points by lukebechtel 4y ago

brucethemoose2 4y ago

Well of course it likes Python, it is Python.

marviel 4y ago
I had to chuckle at how well the markdown python parser did, despite the sometimes foreign typescript-y syntax :D
drdaeman 4y ago
There are let declarations and a built-in actor model and some DSL for RPC services (rather than libraries), but otherwise it's literal Python written with a different syntax. I think I prefer Python in Haskell's disguise: https://pyos.github.io/dg/ https://pyos.github.io/dg/
- metadat 4y ago
  Discussed 7 months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32456151 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32456151 (10 comments) And 3 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22368330 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22368330 (77 comments)
- Kranar 4y ago
  I think OP is playing off the fact that ChatGPT is programmed in Python, and hence the bias towards that language :)
suby 4y ago
A while ago I attempted to get ChatGPT to create a programming language with little direction from me, I wanted it to make its own choices. It ended up recreating Python and then insisting that its language, which was clearly Python, was in fact distinct from Python.
ActorNightly 4y ago
https://madnight.github.io/githut/#/pushes/2021/4 https://madnight.github.io/githut/#/pushes/2021/4
Tanjreeve 4y ago
Also if it's trained on GitHub the majority of the code it sees will be Python and JavaScript. So not a shocking result there.

Jensson 4y ago

This actually isn't a bad idea, GPT takes commonly talked about things and distils them into a response to you, so the language you get when you ask it to make a programming language is probably a mix of well liked programming features that many people added to a language they themselves wanted. When you design a language on your own you will be too biased towards your own cases, this is a way to get around that and source the internet for what they think.

brucethemoose2 4y ago
Nah, GPT has its own biases too. Its preference for Pythonic/JS syntax is a simple but good example, as those are likely the most popular languages in its dataset.
- Jensson 4y ago
  You could probably ask it for a more specific programming language to get around that, like say you want a programming language with static typing and garbage collection. But yeah, if it just prints javascript and python styles then it isn't very helpful, but it is pretty good at source ideas in most cases.

mmoskal 4y ago

It says it has indentation syntax but it clearly uses braces TypeScript-like. I wonder why author describes it as a mix between Python and TypeScript.

ActorNightly 4y ago
JS an Python are the top active languages on Github, so its probably due to the training data.
- grimgrin 4y ago
  they asked why the author described it as such. i wondered the same, failing to see the python influence gpt4 intended
  - panzi 4y ago
    It does have some Python syntax, see my other comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35178406 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35178406
ardit33 4y ago
Looks like Typescript and a bit of Swift as well....
panzi 4y ago
»-> List[Element]« is Python syntax, so is »for x in xs« and »f"text {var}"«. In TypeScript those would be »: Element[]«, »for (const x of xs)«, and »`text ${var}`«.
visarga 4y ago
So it is proof that GPT4 still makes mistakes. But just one reported mistake in a very long session. And it could fix itself if prompted.
- rudy6912 4y ago
  There are more mistakes, as always with GPT. For example: > Some programming languages like TypeScript and Swift use a colon for both variable type annotations and function return types. The choice of using -> in TenetLang [...] Swift uses -> for function return types.

HervalFreire 4y ago

quotation from the link: "LLMs in the GPT family have read every programming language in the world, billions of times. It's been known for some time that these agents can write small snippets of code with some limited success. However, to my knowledge, none of these agents have ever been asked to make their own programming language. This type of task is a bit more complex, and requires a bit more creativity and foresight than much of the internet believes LLMs to have. Some folks on the internet tend to think lowly of LLMs as merely "Stochastic Parrots" -- simply "remixers" of old ideas. In a way, they're right; but I'd argue that remixing is the fundamental force of creativity. Nothing comes from scratch." This^^. Half the internet was in denial about how good LLMs are. I wonder why? Perhaps it's the way humans act when confronted with a machine that can potentially replace much of what makes us special. The advent of chatGPT had millions of people on the internet trying to downplay the intelligence of chatGPT by continuously trying to re-emphasize the things it gets wrong. I think the people who claimed chatGPT was a stochastic parrot are now realizing that they were the ones that were part of a giant parade of parrots regurgitating the same old tired trope of LLMs being nothing but simple word generators. Well you guys were dead wrong, a simple iterative improvement on the same algorithm pretty much ironed out a lot of the issues. I'm guessing that at GPT-10 or 11 we'll have produced something that when compared with humans, humans will be the things that are far more parrot-like.

swatcoder 4y ago
I was reading the quote you included and was sure you were going to lambast him for his arrogance (nobody else has asked it to design a language? hah!) and for bringing an elephant sized straw man to the depthful analytic discussion many of us are trying to have about this new technology, but you went a different way with it. Huh.
- marviel 4y ago
  Wasn't trying to be arrogant, I just wasn't aware of an existing implementation and thought it would be fun to try. :) Do you have links to other efforts? I'd love to know more about it, and would be happy to add references to other existing literature to the article if it improved its quality.

satisfice 4y ago

GTP is interesting enough without people pretending that it is more interesting than it is. This "new programming language" doesn't look new at all. It looks like the same old thing.

marviel 4y ago
You should read further down in the article where it expands on some more advanced concepts -- but in general you're right -- it is really similar to existing languages. I wonder as its power changes, what paradigms it might suggest we break out of. I'd also recommend reading its responses that are non-code in detail -- for instance, in the comment where it introduces TenetLang, GPT-4 actually calls out that it's re-using ideas. I would assume intentionally, because it knows what people are most familiar with. > GPT-4 > In this new language, called "TenetLang," we'll combine a simple syntax inspired by Python with some features from functional and object-oriented languages. Here is an overview of some design choices: - Indentation-based scoping, similar to Python. - Strong typing with type inference, inspired by TypeScript and Kotlin. - First-class functions and closures, similar to JavaScript. - Immutable data structures by default, with optional mutable counterparts. - A concise lambda syntax for anonymous functions. - Pattern matching and destructuring, inspired by Haskell and Rust. - Built-in support for concurrency using async/await and lightweight threads. - Interoperability with other languages using a Foreign Function Interface (FFI).
- karmakaze 4y ago
  GPT-4 didn't learn the distinction between strong types and static typing. That makes sense as much writing also doesn't make the distinction. e.g. Python has strong types, can't add 1 + "2".
vidarh 4y ago
That is true for most "new" human produced.programming languages too. The pool of truly novel programming languages is extremely shallow. Even the number of languages bringing anything new to the table is very limited. So, it doesn't really tell us much (either direction)

aledalgrande 4y ago

My experience with it programming has been atrocius. It keeps making the same mistakes, writing NPEs everywhere and still doing it after I tell it many times how it was wrong (short memory?). Copilot is backed by it too now and I had a better autocomplete of constants with Sorbet than Copilot. Again, in my experience it's not usable if not for the super mainstream and simplest tasks. The biggest issue is that it writes this with utmost confidence, at least on the surface, because there is no measure of how confident it is returned by the model.

mkaic 4y ago
> Copilot is backed by it too now Do you have a source for this? I've been wondering when they'd switch CoPilot over to GPT-4. I didn't expect it would happen so soon, so I'm surprised.
- aledalgrande 4y ago
  https://github.com/features/copilot https://github.com/features/copilot subtitle > GitHub Copilot uses the OpenAI Codex to suggest code and entire functions in real-time, right from your editor. (not sure if it's 4 or 3 tho)
  - hn2017 4y ago
    wiki is your friend. 3.0. i don't think it's been updated to 3.5 or 4.0 yet based on GH discussions. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GitHub_Copilot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GitHub_Copilot GitHub Copilot is powered by the OpenAI Codex,[10] which is a modified, production version of the Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3 (GPT-3), a language model using deep-learning to produce human-like text.[11]
random_cynic 4y ago
Maybe stop treating it like an intern and learn some prompt engineering (there are good tools out there).
- 4y ago

doctoboggan 4y ago

Recently I've been wondering about a somewhat related idea - a programming language designed specifically for a LLM to write in. I wonder how different (if at all) it would be from our current crop of language designed for humans to use. I am a little less impressed by the example given in the post. It seems GPT4 still falls in the trap of being overly dependent on previous responses.

pmoriarty 4y ago
Sometime back there was some news about two AIs spontaneously developing a language to communicate with each other.[1] This was also the theme of art least one scifi book or movie a long time ago. [1] - https://towardsdatascience.com/the-truth-behind-facebook-ai-inventing-a-new-language-37c5d680e5a7 https://towardsdatascience.com/the-truth-behind-facebook-ai-...

nethdeco 4y ago

TenetLang with all the features from different languages, I wonder how would it actually function in a more realistic environment. Will it also inherit the underlying problems of all the said language. I wonder.

marviel 4y ago
I bet it would have some of the same issues. But I'm super interested in going for longer design sessions with the agent, to see how deep we can get into the edge cases. For instance, perhaps just pointing out "hey we had this bug because we thought X was Y but actually it was Z" And then telling the agent to do a "5 Whys" type analysis to get to the root of the problem, and then tell it to try to make a language level patch to eliminate that class of issue. Speculation, but for the first time ever I feel like that kind of thing may be in reach soon-ish

supriyo-biswas 4y ago

I see lots of criticism about how GPT4 simply invented a language that is a mix of Python and TS, and therefore it’s not intelligent. However, given that (anecdotally, at least) 50% of candidates would regurgitate what they learnt from interview prep material given a general design question such as “Design Google drive” and the like, I’m not sure if most people are simply projecting their insecurities.

awill88 4y ago
Here’s the thing: I don’t care if the thing can make programming languages, I care as much as anyone here telling me they can probably demonstrate their programming language. How is that going to help? Or is it all about meeting and beating critics at this point?

apatil 4y ago

It's looking increasingly possible that, at some point in the not-too-far future machines will be so good at creating software that humans won't be competitive in any way, and won't be in the loop at all. I happen to think that once machines reach this point humans won't be competitive in the labor market at all for long. It doesn't seem plausible that automatic driving would still be decades off, or that the trades would be safe from automation indefinitely, when an AI could simply spawn teams of thousands of super-fast ML engineers who don't need to eat, sleep or schedule meetings. But anyway, assuming that humans are completely out of the software loop at some point, I have been wondering what AI-generated code will look like. Will AI continue to build on top of the human-generated open source corpus, or leave it behind? If the latter, will abstraction and code reuse be useful at all for AI's or will it be simpler for them to just build every application completely from scratch? If there is abstraction and code reuse, what will the language look like? What will libraries and API's look like? Will there even be applications, or just a single mega-chatgpt that generates code as needed to serve our requests? Will we even make requests, or will it just read our minds and desires and respond?

behnamoh 4y ago
It's 1am and all I have to say is this: I look forward to seeing that future, but I'm both excited and scared af. I think humans will reduce to curators of AI-generated content and AI training dataset because no matter how good AI gets at becoming human-like, its purpose is ultimately to serve human goals, and those are shifting (e.g., by political movements).
- moonchrome 4y ago
  If you get access to singularity level AGI you would have no incentive to cooperate with other people and a strong incentive in preventing others accessing it. Society is a result of cooperation outperforming individuals. With AGI others are just a risk factor. "Open"AI is already beginning to exhibit this.
  - LordFast 4y ago

sinuhe69 4y ago

All the features it mentioned is already implemented in F#, of course without the silly curly brackets. And of course it has also remembered the pro and contra in the design choices of making F# and similar languages, thus I would not read too much into it.

tjr 4y ago

So I asked it to design a programming language that combined the best elements of Scheme with the best elements of Python (leaving it to decide which elements are best). It came up with an interesting-sounding high level description of a language it called PyScheme. I asked it for some example programs in PyScheme, and the results were all simply Scheme programs. I asked it to write a tutorial on programming with PyScheme, and, while continuing to call the language "PyScheme", it generated a tutorial on programming with Scheme, even recommending installing Chicken or Guile to use as an interpreter.

awestroke 4y ago
Sounds like it performed wonderfully. It included the best parts of python (there are none)
- whoomp12342 4y ago
  negative indexing!
rattray 4y ago
For clarity, was the "it" at hand ChatGPT or GPT-4?
- tjr 4y ago
  ChatGPT. I was under the impression ChatGPT was now running with GPT-4? But if not, then I stand mistaken.
  - theonemind 4y ago
    An email from OpenAI 2 days ago said that GPT4 is on the paid ChatGPT Plus plan, and "severely resource constrained" with a dynamically adjusted usage cap based on availability. Seems like for today, if you're not sure if you're using GPT4, you're not.
    - 4y ago

not-chatgpt 4y ago

These articles are way more hype than substance. The review process is barely sufficient to even give credit for the AI to actually have come up with the language, not that its training data was contaminated in some way. Better to wait for a thorough review on GPT-4's zero shot abilities from an academic paper.

spaceman_2020 4y ago

how much will hundreds of millions of people typing in billions of questions everyday into these LLMs speed up their learning capabilities? To me, it feels like we’re at the start of an exponential growth curve

galaxyLogic 4y ago

Where is the generated compiler and the semantic and syntactic specification for it? Those chatbot-comments feel more like a discussion of a fictional programming language, not a language it actually "created". What does it mean to create a programming language? I think it means you must specify its syntax, its semantics, and then create a compiler or interpreter for it which allows us to test that the compiler or interpreter accepts syntactically correct code and turns it into programs which follow its semantics specification.

zarzavat 4y ago
Writing a compiler or a detailed specification is the “easy” part - it’s just raw slog. The hard part of making a programming language is coming up with novel ideas that fit together into coherent whole: inventing something new and useful.
- galaxyLogic 4y ago
  > hard part of making a programming language is coming up with novel ideas that fit together into coherent whole I don't think anybody's claiming that this chatbot actually came up with novel ideas which fit together into a coherent whole. Are they? And we don't know if the novel ideas --if any-- fit together into a coherent whole until we have a compiler that allows us to test in practice how well those ideas fit together. If creating the compiler for such a new language with new ideas was the easy part I think somebody would have done that already. The AI would have done that if it was the easy part. Just ask it to do it. I say proof is in the pudding.
krupan 4y ago
This!! All the gushing over these GPTs doing what looks to me like, a bad job of talking smart without actually doing anything, make me feel like I'm going insane, or I'm the only sane person left.
- galaxyLogic 4y ago
  I feel the same way. I wonder what makes people so easily believe the hype, and spread more hype along the way. What happened to Metaverse? Web3? BlockChain? Just like yesterday I get on my knees and pray, we won't get fooled again -The Who

barrysteve 4y ago

It's a nice theory developed by the parrot itself. Falls close to the easily amused. I would love to see it try to make a programming language and we can discover the strengths/weaknesses of applied LLMs. It's own generated statements about it's capabilities, are as likely dubious as everything else it generates...

p1necone 4y ago

The example code it generated for this "new" language is almost entirely syntactically correct Typescript.

sangnoir 4y ago
>> Indentation-based scoping, similar to Python. Proceeds to add brace-scopes :-|. The breathlessness of these "ChatGPT N does X" posts is annoying. I know it's an instance of the usual hype cycle which has been going on for a while "Doing X, but with (hyped tech) Y" where X ∈ [Todo app, DB, shell, CLI took, ...], Y ∈ [Go, Rust, ChatGPT n]

pythonvisa 4y ago

This stuff makes me sick to my stomach. I hate this future. How can I continue my career when it is for progressing this monstrosity, watching it claw in another component of my humanity piece by piece? All I want to do is stroke oil paintings, hand written notes, products of the heart and the ernest mind. I feel dread that my life is over. These headlines are killing me inside. I wish I could more easily discriminate between the hyperbole and the legitimate. Maybe after some time this will be saner to me. Please stop the headlines.

awestroke 4y ago
Prompt: please write a comment expressing fear and anguish over headlines about AI becoming better and better
bsaul 4y ago
we ( the software industry ) have spent the last 60 years intruding in other people's job and automating most of their task using computers. Under the saying "it will remove the most boring parts of your activity, and let you focus on where you really make a difference " i guess it's time to taste a bit of our own medecine.
- noelherrick 4y ago
  OP is clearly distressed and you replied with with what comes out as “it’s your fault and you deserve this.” It costs nothing to refrain from replying and only the smallest amount of effort to provide some solidarity with your fellow human. OP, I feel you-I had a similar response to this clearly orchestrated PR campaign. OpenAI really loves that people think that it can replace the entire tech industry with an API. It would mean they are the most valuable company ever to exist. Personally, I’ve been through so many hype waves of “this will take our jobs!!!1” I’m a bit inured to the whole thing. My personal belief is that software development will be the last one to go, the ones to turn out the lights. And we should be grateful that our jobs go away. Let’s go drink wine and eat cheese in the forest, dancing under a moonlit sky. My advice is to get offline, talk to a loved one, pet a dog, go look at art, meditate, basically anything that doesn’t involve a screen.

andsoitis 4y ago

What I'm wondering is to what extent the companies who have invested a lot in LLMs (essentially Google, Meta, and MSFT via Open AI) are already using these models to automate away code creation and even higher up the human-value-chain of solution-imagination? At some point, one would assume that such companies would need fewer and fewer software engineers. It is only a matter of time. As humans, who can imagine the future, now is the time to rethink where you add unique value in this universe.

phs318u 4y ago

The chances of a future Butlerian Jihad just went up a few points.

dsign 4y ago
Indeed. I often see in HN a self-defeating attitude which is: - Step 1: we invent our machine overlords, because it's unavoidable, we are genetically and socially forced to do it. - Step 2: we perish. Neither step 1 nor step 2 are guaranteed. People don't want to be replaced. People with power particularly don't want to be replaced. In a democracy, where by definition everybody is in power, the entire society has a strong incentive to--at the very least--keep the machines at bay. It could be as simple as making it illegal to give the machines a "you must survive and pass your genes, I mean, program" directive, or as comprehensive as a Butlerian Jihad :)

laserbeam 4y ago

Impressive. No really, it's super cool. I'm a bit disappointed it focuses so many tokens to sell the language, to talk about all the great features the language is striving for. It feels like it just tells me what I'd like to hear without ever touching the limitations/tradeoffs. I'm not talking about the language itself, just the response style. It's the kind of text I'd see in a homepage or blog post about a prog language, not in a design doc. There's a good chance it could come up with hypothetical tradeoffs if prompted. PS. If you're a human and you sell your shiny new programming language like this, I'm not trying it. I really care to know limitations up front.

Nasreddin_Hodja 4y ago

But do we need yet another language? Python's syntax is almost ideal. Maybe GPT would improve it's performance instead making it 100 times faster?

marviel 4y ago
Love python -- wish it had better types still, and that people were better about putting them in. May be getting better -- but more often than not I'm seeing totally untyped python libs when I try to crack something new open. Coming from Typescript makes me feel like I'm missing home.

cryptozeus 4y ago

"But let’s talk about today’s “frontier” of jobs that haven’t been “automated away”. There’s one category that in many ways seems surprising to still be “with us”: jobs that involve lots of mechanical manipulation, like construction, fulfillment, food preparation, etc. But there’s a missing piece of technology here: there isn’t yet good general-purpose robotics (as there is general-purpose computing), and we humans still have the edge in dexterity, mechanical adaptability, etc. But I’m quite sure that in time—and perhaps quite suddenly—the necessary technology will be developed (and, yes, I have ideas about how to do it). And this will mean that most of today’s “mechanical manipulation” jobs will be “automated away”—and won’t need people to do them."

dx034 4y ago
Absolutely. We've been great at building AI in software, but hardware is still absolutely lacking. Robots are nowhere near usable for even simple tasks, at least if they don't follow the same pattern each time. Just look at households, there's still no robot that can empty a dishwasher reliably (unless maybe you build a specialized one for just that task), while it's a task much simpler than what GPT-4 can perform on the software side.
- mlboss 4y ago
  I read somewhere that two dishwashers are the solution. Put dirty dishes in one and pick clean from another one. Then switch roles. No robot needed
  - dx034 4y ago
    Dishwashers were just an unimportant example. Construction, retail and logistics are examples where there's a lot of very simple tasks that robots cannot perform and that pay very poorly.
- zamnos 4y ago
  I wouldn't hold your breath either, Google shut down their attempt. https://www.theverge.com/2023/2/24/23613214/everyday-robots-google-alphabet-shut-down https://www.theverge.com/2023/2/24/23613214/everyday-robots-...

wruza 4y ago

I still don’t get why service, actor and rpc must be language keywords, when they aren’t semantically bound to a remote provider’s signatures. Why there’s actor needed at all? Rpc in place of async? If you have an rpc protocol implemented under `rpc`, why not just make an interface named PersonService and specialize a connection with it? It doesn’t actually make any sense.

marviel 4y ago
I think the choice could be made a few different ways for sure. The interesting thing about the rpc object, that it didn't explore in this instance explicitly (but I must assume it had "plans" for if you want to call it that?) was things that you may be allowed to do with the rpc object that you couldn't with classes, and vice versa. When I have a minute, I'll feed it your question, and see what it says

yowzadave 4y ago

Last year, when Blake Lemoine was fired by Google for claiming his AI was sentient, a lot of people on this website sensibly noted that the danger of these chatbots was not that they were sentient, but that average people could easily be tricked into thinking that they were. And now here we are: it seems we tech people are every bit as susceptible to this kind of thinking as the average joes we looked down on. Actually look at this “language” that GPT-4 has written: it’s just a mishmash of features from the most commonly blogged-about existing programming languages. It has no conceptual insights, no original ideas, no taste that isn’t cribbed from one of the few languages it’s copying from. There are cases where getting a short distillation of the mean opinion of The Internet is useful. But designing a new programming language is clearly not one of them, mostly because the chatbot is not “designing” a language—it is guessing the most likely response to a question about programming languages.

habitue 4y ago
Yeah, I find llms are really useful for taking premises you supply, and trying them out, or exploring inconsistencies in them. It's decent at the synthesis kind of creativity (mashups, remixes, etc) but it isn't smart enough yet to make really big inferential leaps that we would consider more original.
marviel 4y ago
I agree with your point about the dangers of chatbots being mistaken as sentient. And I also recognize the dangers of the self-improving systems like this in general -- that's why I'm not letting it run loose with a LangChainAI Agent script to self-execute a new language (though wouldn't that be fascinating?) While the language it generated needs refinement, the design process is iterative, and it takes time to develop a programming language that is worth using. I encourage you to consider how you would approach designing a programming language. Like you, I would likely start by incorporating my favorite features from languages I love and addressing problems I've encountered in the past, similar to the dialogue GPT and I have in the post. As I mention in the post -- creativity often involves remixing existing ideas, and GPT-4's attempt at generating a programming language is no exception. Notably, it also called out explicitly the constructs it was borrowing from other languages when designing the language. It's worth noting that this was GPT-4's initial attempt at something highly complex, and even if there are "plot holes" -- it's a noteworthy achievement in and of itself.

kkarpkkarp 4y ago

I've already asked one day chatgpt 3.5 to write me some code in the programming languge which he (it?) thinks is best designed and it gave me the result in something what was type annotated Python

stevenjgarner 4y ago

"I stole every lick I ever played. All my stuff is stolen from somebody else. I'm not a creator, I'm an accumulator." - Keith Richards, Rolling Stone Magazine, April 15, 2010 issue.

tasuki 4y ago

> If you were going to design a new programming language that encompassed all of these ideas, what would it's syntax look like? Why this obsession with syntax? Semantics are way more important! GPT rightly chooses to ignore the question and answers with a high level proposal of design.

tasuki 4y ago

It has invented Scala! function sortByName(persons: List[Person]): List[Person] { return persons.sortBy(p => p.name) } Scala uses `def` rather than `function`, but other that that I think this should be valid?

seydor 4y ago

> Basically looks like Typescript and python had a baby. And that's why it's useless. The model rehashed stackoverflow / hn /reddit from the past 10 years. There s no indication it's optimal, it's just (recently) popular I don't know about you guys, but my excitement about GPT models is starting to deflate , i think they 've already beyond the peak of their abilities and more size is not enough for intelligence

tasuki 4y ago

> That's kind of neat -- what other even more creative ideas do you have for deeply integrating powerful LLMs directly into the language itself? > [GPT lists 7 ideas] My idea would be not to automate testing, but rather the implementation: the human writes the tests and the LLM writes the code to make them pass. Automating testing is exactly the wrong way around: we let the LLM choose its own end goals. We'll be better off if we choose the end goals and task the LLM with achieving them.

kaufmae 4y ago

That language exists already. TenetLang actually is Swift

pharmakom 4y ago

Hmm it suggested whitespace syntax and then generated a curly brace language. The language it described already exists too - it’s F#

invpix 4y ago

Anyone else notice TenetLang looks an awful lot like Motoko?

banjodebanks 4y ago

[dead]

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

redbar0n 4y ago

It's funny that everyone replies with "That language exists already.", and then proclaim it to be either: TypeScript, Python, Swift, Scala or F# etc. Why is it funny? Because GPT-4 was probably trained on examples from all of those languages, and has produced an averaged mashup of languages: so everyone can find something which is similar in it, and then pattern-match it to a (rather mainstream) language that they use!

karmakaze 4y ago
The GPT-4 output still looks like a parlour trick to me. As you say, it is just regurgitating using good sentence structure what it read. I'd just as soon use F# as-is, instead of this hodge podge TenetLang.

andygocke 4y ago

I don't think this works... It looks like FetchPersons is free in the body of the receive, and I can't see any indication of the synchronization points in the actor. I mean, maybe every function in the actor is implicitly synchronized, but that's... a choice, and I think it needs other changes to work around that fact. I actually tried to get Chatgpt to help me design a new language feature for C# and it was useless. Basically just gave me existing C#.