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What advantage do old languages have that can’t be overcome or at least reduced to insignificance? The 50-year head start in training data, runtime, and ecosys
by armchairhacker 7mo ago
What advantage do old languages have that can’t be overcome or at least reduced to insignificance?
The 50-year head start in training data, runtime, and ecosystem? That may not be much, because LLMs are rapidly accelerating software development. LLMs can also generalize: take what they learned for one language and apply it to a “similar” language (and I think most modern languages are similar enough for broad effective translation: all have records/unions, objects, functions, types, control-flow, exceptions, and more). Some fairly recent languages (e.g. Rust, Swift) already have comparable runtimes and ecosystems to older ones, from human-driven development acceleration and concept generalization.
In a recent study, LLMs solved the most exercises in Elixir (https://autocodebench.github.io https://autocodebench.github.io Table 4). Anecdotally, I’ve heard others say that LLMs code best in Rust, and (for UI) Swift. More importantly, I don’t see an older language advantage that is widening from LLM use; an older language probably is better for most use cases today, but any written code can be translated or regenerated into a newer one.
- beachy 7mo ago> I don’t see an older language advantage that is widening from LLM use A classic one is C++. Microcontrollers like esp32 cost about $10 these days, for a machine more capable than an early PC. One downside though is that you typically need C++ to program them, and the barrier to entry with C++ is very high, especially for non-programmers. LLMs remove that barrier so that anyone can create powerful embedded devices - programmed in C++ - without knowing anything about C++.