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A few problems with this Fable's project: 1. It's not Python by any means, it's a subset with its own runtime, its own quirks and nuances; 2. It will be impos
by leobuskin 3mo ago
A few problems with this Fable's project:
1. It's not Python by any means, it's a subset with its own runtime, its own quirks and nuances;
2. It will be impossible to maintain parity with CPython without AI assistance;
3. It will die the same way as dozens of similar (even non-AI projects) died before, and reasons will be the same: (1) and (2).
- subarctic 3mo ago"Without ai assistance" - ok, but what about with ai assistance?
- zahlman 3mo agoFor a project like this, relying on AI assistance also makes it effectively dead in the water.
- minimaxir 3mo agoWhy?
- bt1a 3mo ago[flagged]
- all2 3mo agoTime-cost for machines instead of willing knowledgeable humans. The former requires money, the latter requires passion. Arguably, passion for a project is without price.
- zero1009 3mo agoSomeone pays for the AI? That's the new human maintainer.
- bloppe 3mo agoHypothetically, maybe. In practice, probably not.
- CookieCrisp 3mo agoIf it's valuable enough to someone, and it isn't keeping up, someone will pay. If it's not valuable enough for someone to pay, then who cares?
- jpfromlondon 3mo agoPlenty of important things have been born of passion without necessity.
- nozzlegear 3mo agoWho will pay if someone, somewhere is not passionate about it?
- throw1234567891 3mo agoYou can spin up a model locally and pay yourself. Who will maintain the project if the passionate sole maintainer burns out?
- inigyou 3mo ago
- wild_pointer 3mo agoTrust
- simonw 3mo agoGood luck implementing and then maintaining a project of this size and complexity at ~100 lines of verified code per human developer per day.
- mwcampbell 3mo agoI wonder how you arrived at that number. Is it perhaps a number that we should aspire to, if we want to write high-quality, maintainable code by hand?
- simonw 3mo agoI've been doing some reading recently around what the literature expects a professional software engineer to produce in a day. In ~1976 Mythical Man Month era it was around 5 lines of fully debugged assembly. Code Complete 2nd edition ~2004 bumped that up to 10-50 delivered lines of code per day. I found other estimates of around 20-60. I need to pull them altogether into a cited article. Based on that plus my own experience I think 100 lines per day of production-level, reviewed and debugged code was a reasonably higher target for a professional software engineer up until just a couple of years ago. Today I'm frequently pushing 2,000 to 4,000 - and that's not vibe coded junk (I can easily hit 10,000+ if I'm not reviewing anything), that's code that I've reviewed and am happy to put my name to. Obviously counting lines of code is a stupid, easily gamed metric. But I still think there's signal there. If you want to build a sophisticated piece of software you're going to have to write a bunch of code to do it. Writing at 1,000+ lines of code per day vs 100 will get you there faster.
- frollogaston 3mo agoNot convinced. I was looking for an answer like "it doesn't actually have parity with CPython." If it does, that's a decent indication that it can be sustained.
- leobuskin 3mo agoIt's possible, but we're at the moment when most of us can ask Fable to implement a custom compiler to a custom target for our favorite language, and even use it as a part of custom solution. Why do I need someone else's implementation? Where's the magic in this project? What's the secret sauce?
- coldtea 3mo ago>Where's the magic in this project? What's the secret sauce? Someone else paying for the tokens. Also someone seeing it through (should that come). Obviously we're not "at the moment when most of us can ask Fable to implement a custom compiler to a custom target for our favorite language, and even use it as a part of custom solution", without thousands to spare and lots of time to shape the solution.
- cyanydeez 3mo agoIt's like we invented a worse github.
- coldtea 3mo agoGimphub.
- dotancohen 3mo agoTo be fair, most of the training data likely came from GitHub.
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- hannasanarion 3mo agoEven if it does cost thousands (does it? I genuinely have no idea how to scope such a thing) that might be a good price if a custom compiler to your custom target is something you really want. People have paid far more for far less. If you're a hobbyist trying to compile python to your weird little arduino based thing, then that's a lot of money and you would want to use somebody else's solution, no doubt. But if you're an aerospace company trying to compile for a flight control computer (and I guess you really want to use python for some reason), spending thousands of dollars on tokens to make and maintain a custom compiler could represent serious savings. The big picture impact of AI that I see/anticipate the most is SAAS dying out because AI coding makes this kind of enablement and support software easier to make in-house, and this feels like an example of that, but maybe I'm seeing what I expect to see.
- bt1a 3mo agoit will be impossible to maintain parity with wetware
- up2isomorphism 3mo agoThen the question is why? Because that is an another way of saying donating tokens.
- rurban 3mo agoReading is hard. It runs and passes the full cpython testsuite, just 5x faster. With AI it's 100x easier to maintain than by hand. It reminds my on pperl. same approach using crane lift. Looks good
- ubercore 3mo agoHow am I misreading this part of the readme? > What is explicitly not done yet — this is the active roadmap, in order: > CPython test suite (cpython-full): the standing grind; failures are clustered and burned down per wave.
- leobuskin 3mo agoIt passes only curated corpus (snippets), not the full CPython test suite. So, yes, reading is hard. Nothing against AI, btw.
- bunderbunder 3mo agoThe “status” section of the project’s readme explicitly says that it is not passing the full test suite, and that the AOT compiler passes fewer tests than the JIT one. It also explicitly says that they’re still working on building out the standard library. I’m maybe not as pessimistic as leobuskin, but they are absolutely right that this is not the first time someone has tried to build an alternative Python implementation, and that all previous ones have failed because they weren’t able to get close enough to 100% parity to be acceptable to most users. Python is an unusually quirky language. I kind of wonder if “written in Rust” adds an extra headwind here because there’s nothing even remotely memory-safe about Python’s extension mechanism. I don’t know enough to know, but I have read about the death of a few of these projects in the past and a common theme of the post-mortem seems to be, “It went so smoothly at the start that we were caught off guard how much of a brick wall the last 5% was going to be.”
- anitil 3mo agoYour reply would have been much better without the first line [0] > Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that" [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- TZubiri 3mo ago>1. It's not Python by any means, it's a subset with its own runtime, its own quirks and nuances; A subset of python is python. Half a tomato is still tomato >2. It will be impossible to maintain parity with CPython without AI assistance What does that even mean? If you would have said that it's impossible to update to python 3.15 of further, I'd get it.
- geraneum 3mo ago> A subset of python is python. Half a tomato is still tomato The funny thing about this is not that the first sentence is wrong, which it is. It’s the failed reductio ad absurdum.
- skeledrew 3mo ago> A subset of python is python. Half a tomato is still tomato A subset of a calculator is still a calculator, but that subset definitely can't do everything the full version can.
- cwillu 3mo agoMost subsets of a physical calculator are properly called “a broken calculator”.
- skeledrew 3mo agoThis isn't about the shell of a calculator though, but the functionality. Like if the only operations are addition and subtraction, theoretically you could derive the effects of other operations but it's extremely limiting.
- bunderbunder 3mo agoSo yeah, half of Python might still be Turing-complete, but it wouldn’t really be Python for any practical purpose. Just like how a device that can’t multiply or divide is not a 4-function calculator; it’s more like an adding machine. Many of which did multiply by serial addition.