6 ms·

Why care about programming languages

48 points by b-man 2mo ago

alpha_trion 2mo ago
I think a lot of folks in the industry are feeling this way. It’s an existential crisis for many of us right now. Why bother progressing when slop is “good enough”? Some of us still care but I have a feeling there are a lot of people that don’t.
- kusokurae 2mo ago
  Good enough IFF you are dealing with a cute web app or simple SAAS or something. Software engineers feeling down should think about software designed to track medication administration, or validate their tax calculations, or to decide whether to flag you for a CIFAS marker, or whatever, and then imagine the generic "fuck it, that'll do" type vibecoder-level-engineer handling the code.
  - yuye 2mo ago
    >Software engineers feeling down should think about software designed to track medication administration, or validate their tax calculations, or to decide whether to flag you for a CIFAS marker, or whatever, and then imagine the generic "fuck it, that'll do" type vibecoder-level-engineer handling the code. That makes me feel even more down, because I know this will happen.
  - geraneum 2mo ago
    Even on a less dangerous level, repeated mistakes can be detrimental to your business. Imagine a typical ecommerce app for selling anything. Mess with people’s orders and money and you’ll go out of business or get sued or get a bad reputation. This not even about AI, it’s just how business works.
  - Foobar8568 2mo ago
    Novartis outsourced most of its development in India, also lots of medicine is manufactured there in dubious conditions and has been for years, if not decades, the ship has sailed long before AI slop.
- ulrikrasmussen 2mo ago
  There's very little evidence, if any, to suggest that slop is actually "good enough". I have interacted with multiple apps that clearly were written using AI by people who did not actually spend the time understanding what was made, and it most certainly was not an experience that I would classify as "good enough". I know this may be some kind of reverse survivorship bias and that I simply do not notice all of the slop around me that somehow is truly "good enough", but I think I need to see some concrete examples to convince me.
  - ozim 2mo ago
    Do you care about each and every single app you encounter? Maybe you use your 2-10 apps and that’s it? Do you even let’s say — for the excercise sake — use those apps fully, each and every screen? I use dozens of apps, most of functionality from the ones I need is a single flow or function. I don’t care about setting my avatars or filling „user details” unless it is a delivery app or a shop. Most frameworks have boilerplate for that but there are dozens of such screens that don’t have boilerplate yet those are nice to have even if not used by 90% of users.
  - brabel 2mo ago
    > I have interacted with multiple apps that clearly were written using AI by people who did not actually spend the time understanding what was made… That kind of proves the opposite point: you’re using those apps so they were good enough for the people who made it to get to you who would probably never even be able go write an app. Also are you comparing the apps to your average, bug ridden app written before LLMs existed? Maybe they’re not that much worse.
    - ulrikrasmussen 2mo ago
      No, it doesn't, because I gave up using them.
  - alpha_trion 2mo ago
    I certainly still care but I've seen a lot of founders and investors who don't seem to. :(
kusokurae 2mo ago
Any and all discussion that suggests the deprecation of human-held domain-specific, manually-able knowledge & skill, on the basis of LLM capacity, is propaganda.
ulrikrasmussen 2mo ago
Can't remember who said it, but I think the most poignant commentary about the prospects of LLMs completely replacing humans is the simple observation that yes, you can delegate many if not all of your tasks requiring thinking to LLMs, but it is inherently impossible to delegate the task of understanding. If you hope to write an efficient prompt which gives you what you think you want, you need to actually understand what you want, which also requires you to understand what you currently have. Programming languages are a medium for transferring and - not the least - maintaining shared understanding of a software system in terms of the basic abstractions that the programming language provides. The need for good programming languages does not go away just because we use LLMs to write the code, on the contrary: would you rather review LLM-written assembly or LLM-written Haskell?
- xscott 2mo ago
  > would you rather review LLM-written assembly or LLM-written Haskell? I wish we had a language that was targeted specifically for LLMs to write and humans and LLMs to inspect: - Simple robust syntax - One obvious way to do things - Static type checking - Purely functional encouraged, escape hatches for performance - Inspect-able, testable, and reviewable in small pieces - Something like formal predicates, preconditions, post-conditions, assertions, or effects typing Giving LLMs all the surface area of Python, JavaScript, TypeScript, or C++ seems like a huge mistake. It's amazing it works as well as it does. Well written Haskell is beautiful, but there are way too many ways to write Haskell: https://people.willamette.edu/~fruehr/haskell/evolution.html https://people.willamette.edu/~fruehr/haskell/evolution.html
  - B-Con 2mo ago
    Go seems like a pragmatic fit, even though it was obviously not designed for LLMs and nor is it purely functional. I review a lot of Go code, which means I review a lot of LLM Go code. Even though the human vs LLM authorship distinction has strong signals, Go's simple nature seems like a useful constraint on how LLMs can express themselves.
    - 2mo ago
xscott 2mo ago
There's a lot that's worth thinking about and discussing on this topic, but it's too loaded with emotional stuff for many people to hope for a productive discussion. I'm a programming languages nerd. I was paid to program in over 20 different languages over my 25 year career. I read up on many more languages along the way, and I wrote pet projects in a few of those. I've written a couple assemblers, compilers, and interpreters for my own languages. I think literally everyone should be taught to program in elementary school. It's arguably one of the best ways to teach logical thought and careful organization of ideas. I like Alan Perlis's quote: You think you know when you can learn, are more sure when you can write, even more when you can teach, but certain when you can program. With all of that out of the way, I think there are interesting questions to ask going forward: If you were starting a business for a great software idea, with your own savings on the line, would you hire 10 AI hostile programmers to implement the idea or 2 AI friendly people and get them some subscriptions to the top models? Remember: if it doesn't come together, it's YOUR money on the line. What are the best programming languages for LLMs to program with? Could someone design a better language that fits their strengths and weaknesses? I think the most popular human languages have way too much affordance for concerns that don't apply to models. I think letting LLMs program in human friendly languages makes the results more difficult for humans to inspect. There's a slight chicken and egg problem based on the training sets used by large models, but this can be addressed with LoRA tuning and similar techniques for open weight models. How can we make LLMs scale better so that people who don't like to program can get better "vibe coding" results? Tools like Excel are huge force multipliers for so many people who aren't interested in writing traditional code. I think it should be possible for non-programmers to solve their own problems and trust the results without becoming programmers. Anyways, I've got my own partially formed answers to those questions, but I'd like to hear what other people who aren't still suffering stages of LLM programming grief have to say and ask.
- steve1977 2mo ago
  > I think letting LLMs program in human friendly languages makes the results more difficult for humans to inspect. Does it? I think for example Ruby seems to work quite well with LLMs in this regard. Or is this not what you would consider human friendly?
- 2mo ago
lwansbrough 2mo ago
Why stop there though? My harness writes WAT directly and compiles with wasmtime. It’s very fast and very difficult to read.
remiminnebo 2mo ago
English has become the new programming language
bigstrat2003 2mo ago
You should care about programming languages because humans are still better at programming than an LLM (yes, even better than $currrent_newest_model). And if you care about what you are making, you should be writing the code yourself. If you don't care about making something good, then yeah you don't need to actually learn how to program, but that's no way to work.
kimjune01 2mo ago
actor paradigm is huge for clamping down on agents
armchairhacker 2mo ago
If an LLM actually does think like a human, humans benefit from good programming languages, why wouldn’t an LLM? Programming languages allow LLMs to build invariants they can’t enforce themselves (type systems), reduce context window (syntax sugar) and represent abstract models in a way that may improve understanding i.e. increase the likelihood of predicting a correct next token. Plus, we want to understand LLM output, so it should at least be convertible into a language that’s easy for humans. EDIT: and actually reading the article, learning a new programming paradigm improves your ability to model even in your head, by noticing some abstract thing fits some programming concept, then manipulating the concept (e.g. translation your data model into the algebraic data type,`(a | b) * (a | c)`, then realizing it’s isomorphic to `a * (b | c)`).
- trinari 2mo ago
  Yep, it helps llms, and the same is true for libraries. Technically neither are necessary. Imagine an llm that's restricted to assembly.
est 2mo ago
I think PL will have a second coming. Just like Linus Torvalds said: > AI is a productivity tool exactly like compilers were. Compilers boosted programming by 1000x. AI adds another 10x on top. Enormous. But nobody says "the compiler wrote my code." We witness more and more PL ideas re-invented in Agentic AI world. Branching, looping, task orchestration, workflow, etc. Heck even GOTO seems tempting these days.
jagadaga 2mo ago
> Why spend years mastering language intricacies when an AI can generate code in any language on demand? You can learn relatively well any programming language in a week. You don't need to master "language intricacies".
cubefox 2mo ago
> In the AI age, understanding these concepts becomes more important, not less—they are what separate those who merely prompt from those who truly engineer. But doesn't that sound like cope? It's like an old ASM programmer telling himself that his obscure assembly knowledge will surely still give him great advantages as he is forced to switch to React.js development.
- yuye 2mo ago
  >It's like an old ASM programmer telling himself that his obscure assembly knowledge will surely still give him great advantages as he is forced to switch to React.js development. The engineers that are truly skilled in writing pure assembly wouldn't be forced to switch to React. The existence of higher level languages doesn't mean lower level languages are useless.
  - cubefox 2mo ago
    I'm pretty sure that nowadays much less assembly is written than a few decades ago. Even video games used to be written in assembly. So the demand for assembly programmers went down, and the skill became less useful, unless the supply went down by the same amount.
    - yuye 2mo ago
      You're right, but that doesn't mean those assembly programmers are suddenly forced to write React. Being an expert at assembly probably means you're an expert in low level programming. We still have a need for those people, because they'll probably also be able to write C/C++/Rust/Zig/etc very competently. I consider myself pretty competent in C(And C++ to some degree), and I have a pretty good understanding of how computers work on a lower level, but if you ask me to write React UI components, I probably wouldn't fare well. I understand Javascript/Typescript, sure, but I'm just not familiar with the best practices of modern day frontend engineering.
      - cubefox 2mo ago
imtringued 2mo ago
My big problem is that nobody is working on truly innovative programming languages anymore. Everyone wants to build another iteration of a C style language with incremental improvement for little benefit. The problem is that we probably reached the general purpose frontier a long time ago and there are just a few surface level things that need to be changed here and there, which is not worth a whole new language. It goes against the programmer's ego, but the way forward is by adding more restrictions. The people complaining about the borrow checker in Rust just don't get it. If you want programming to improve, you will have to give up the ability to write every conceivable program.
- yuye 2mo ago
  >My big problem is that nobody is working on truly innovative programming languages anymore. How many languages are truly innovative? I'd say the most recent example is Rust, as you mentioned, being innovative with its borrow checker, but what other recent languages really are? Many modern languages are not innovative, but just add quality of life features. A good example is Kotlin: Just another JVM language, nothing revolutionary, but I enjoy writing it over Java. >It goes against the programmer's ego, but the way forward is by adding more restrictions. The people complaining about the borrow checker in Rust just don't get it. If you want programming to improve, you will have to give up the ability to write every conceivable program. I agree and also disagree. The "ability to write every conceivable program" also means writing programs that are faulty. Maybe that's your point, in which case I don't consider it a bad thing to limit the ability to do so. A language like C let's you fuck around and find out. It's powerful and "easy". As the saying goes, it gives you a gun and doesn't stop you from shooting yourself in the foot.
jthomastelles 2mo ago
[dead]
Alfredo66 2mo ago
[flagged]

48 points by b-man 2mo ago

I think a lot of folks in the industry are feeling this way. It’s an existential crisis for many of us right now. Why bother progressing when slop is “good enough”? Some of us still care but I have a feeling there are a lot of people that don’t.

kusokurae 2mo ago
Good enough IFF you are dealing with a cute web app or simple SAAS or something. Software engineers feeling down should think about software designed to track medication administration, or validate their tax calculations, or to decide whether to flag you for a CIFAS marker, or whatever, and then imagine the generic "fuck it, that'll do" type vibecoder-level-engineer handling the code.
- yuye 2mo ago
  >Software engineers feeling down should think about software designed to track medication administration, or validate their tax calculations, or to decide whether to flag you for a CIFAS marker, or whatever, and then imagine the generic "fuck it, that'll do" type vibecoder-level-engineer handling the code. That makes me feel even more down, because I know this will happen.
- geraneum 2mo ago
  Even on a less dangerous level, repeated mistakes can be detrimental to your business. Imagine a typical ecommerce app for selling anything. Mess with people’s orders and money and you’ll go out of business or get sued or get a bad reputation. This not even about AI, it’s just how business works.
- Foobar8568 2mo ago
  Novartis outsourced most of its development in India, also lots of medicine is manufactured there in dubious conditions and has been for years, if not decades, the ship has sailed long before AI slop.
ulrikrasmussen 2mo ago
There's very little evidence, if any, to suggest that slop is actually "good enough". I have interacted with multiple apps that clearly were written using AI by people who did not actually spend the time understanding what was made, and it most certainly was not an experience that I would classify as "good enough". I know this may be some kind of reverse survivorship bias and that I simply do not notice all of the slop around me that somehow is truly "good enough", but I think I need to see some concrete examples to convince me.
- ozim 2mo ago
  Do you care about each and every single app you encounter? Maybe you use your 2-10 apps and that’s it? Do you even let’s say — for the excercise sake — use those apps fully, each and every screen? I use dozens of apps, most of functionality from the ones I need is a single flow or function. I don’t care about setting my avatars or filling „user details” unless it is a delivery app or a shop. Most frameworks have boilerplate for that but there are dozens of such screens that don’t have boilerplate yet those are nice to have even if not used by 90% of users.
- brabel 2mo ago
  > I have interacted with multiple apps that clearly were written using AI by people who did not actually spend the time understanding what was made… That kind of proves the opposite point: you’re using those apps so they were good enough for the people who made it to get to you who would probably never even be able go write an app. Also are you comparing the apps to your average, bug ridden app written before LLMs existed? Maybe they’re not that much worse.
  - ulrikrasmussen 2mo ago
    No, it doesn't, because I gave up using them.
- alpha_trion 2mo ago
  I certainly still care but I've seen a lot of founders and investors who don't seem to. :(

kusokurae 2mo ago

Any and all discussion that suggests the deprecation of human-held domain-specific, manually-able knowledge & skill, on the basis of LLM capacity, is propaganda.

ulrikrasmussen 2mo ago

Can't remember who said it, but I think the most poignant commentary about the prospects of LLMs completely replacing humans is the simple observation that yes, you can delegate many if not all of your tasks requiring thinking to LLMs, but it is inherently impossible to delegate the task of understanding. If you hope to write an efficient prompt which gives you what you think you want, you need to actually understand what you want, which also requires you to understand what you currently have. Programming languages are a medium for transferring and - not the least - maintaining shared understanding of a software system in terms of the basic abstractions that the programming language provides. The need for good programming languages does not go away just because we use LLMs to write the code, on the contrary: would you rather review LLM-written assembly or LLM-written Haskell?

xscott 2mo ago
> would you rather review LLM-written assembly or LLM-written Haskell? I wish we had a language that was targeted specifically for LLMs to write and humans and LLMs to inspect: - Simple robust syntax - One obvious way to do things - Static type checking - Purely functional encouraged, escape hatches for performance - Inspect-able, testable, and reviewable in small pieces - Something like formal predicates, preconditions, post-conditions, assertions, or effects typing Giving LLMs all the surface area of Python, JavaScript, TypeScript, or C++ seems like a huge mistake. It's amazing it works as well as it does. Well written Haskell is beautiful, but there are way too many ways to write Haskell: https://people.willamette.edu/~fruehr/haskell/evolution.html https://people.willamette.edu/~fruehr/haskell/evolution.html
- B-Con 2mo ago
  Go seems like a pragmatic fit, even though it was obviously not designed for LLMs and nor is it purely functional. I review a lot of Go code, which means I review a lot of LLM Go code. Even though the human vs LLM authorship distinction has strong signals, Go's simple nature seems like a useful constraint on how LLMs can express themselves.
  - 2mo ago

xscott 2mo ago

There's a lot that's worth thinking about and discussing on this topic, but it's too loaded with emotional stuff for many people to hope for a productive discussion. I'm a programming languages nerd. I was paid to program in over 20 different languages over my 25 year career. I read up on many more languages along the way, and I wrote pet projects in a few of those. I've written a couple assemblers, compilers, and interpreters for my own languages. I think literally everyone should be taught to program in elementary school. It's arguably one of the best ways to teach logical thought and careful organization of ideas. I like Alan Perlis's quote: You think you know when you can learn, are more sure when you can write, even more when you can teach, but certain when you can program. With all of that out of the way, I think there are interesting questions to ask going forward: If you were starting a business for a great software idea, with your own savings on the line, would you hire 10 AI hostile programmers to implement the idea or 2 AI friendly people and get them some subscriptions to the top models? Remember: if it doesn't come together, it's YOUR money on the line. What are the best programming languages for LLMs to program with? Could someone design a better language that fits their strengths and weaknesses? I think the most popular human languages have way too much affordance for concerns that don't apply to models. I think letting LLMs program in human friendly languages makes the results more difficult for humans to inspect. There's a slight chicken and egg problem based on the training sets used by large models, but this can be addressed with LoRA tuning and similar techniques for open weight models. How can we make LLMs scale better so that people who don't like to program can get better "vibe coding" results? Tools like Excel are huge force multipliers for so many people who aren't interested in writing traditional code. I think it should be possible for non-programmers to solve their own problems and trust the results without becoming programmers. Anyways, I've got my own partially formed answers to those questions, but I'd like to hear what other people who aren't still suffering stages of LLM programming grief have to say and ask.

steve1977 2mo ago
> I think letting LLMs program in human friendly languages makes the results more difficult for humans to inspect. Does it? I think for example Ruby seems to work quite well with LLMs in this regard. Or is this not what you would consider human friendly?
2mo ago

lwansbrough 2mo ago

Why stop there though? My harness writes WAT directly and compiles with wasmtime. It’s very fast and very difficult to read.

remiminnebo 2mo ago

English has become the new programming language

bigstrat2003 2mo ago

You should care about programming languages because humans are still better at programming than an LLM (yes, even better than $currrent_newest_model). And if you care about what you are making, you should be writing the code yourself. If you don't care about making something good, then yeah you don't need to actually learn how to program, but that's no way to work.

kimjune01 2mo ago

actor paradigm is huge for clamping down on agents

armchairhacker 2mo ago

If an LLM actually does think like a human, humans benefit from good programming languages, why wouldn’t an LLM? Programming languages allow LLMs to build invariants they can’t enforce themselves (type systems), reduce context window (syntax sugar) and represent abstract models in a way that may improve understanding i.e. increase the likelihood of predicting a correct next token. Plus, we want to understand LLM output, so it should at least be convertible into a language that’s easy for humans. EDIT: and actually reading the article, learning a new programming paradigm improves your ability to model even in your head, by noticing some abstract thing fits some programming concept, then manipulating the concept (e.g. translation your data model into the algebraic data type,`(a | b) * (a | c)`, then realizing it’s isomorphic to `a * (b | c)`).

trinari 2mo ago
Yep, it helps llms, and the same is true for libraries. Technically neither are necessary. Imagine an llm that's restricted to assembly.

est 2mo ago

I think PL will have a second coming. Just like Linus Torvalds said: > AI is a productivity tool exactly like compilers were. Compilers boosted programming by 1000x. AI adds another 10x on top. Enormous. But nobody says "the compiler wrote my code." We witness more and more PL ideas re-invented in Agentic AI world. Branching, looping, task orchestration, workflow, etc. Heck even GOTO seems tempting these days.

jagadaga 2mo ago

> Why spend years mastering language intricacies when an AI can generate code in any language on demand? You can learn relatively well any programming language in a week. You don't need to master "language intricacies".

cubefox 2mo ago

> In the AI age, understanding these concepts becomes more important, not less—they are what separate those who merely prompt from those who truly engineer. But doesn't that sound like cope? It's like an old ASM programmer telling himself that his obscure assembly knowledge will surely still give him great advantages as he is forced to switch to React.js development.

yuye 2mo ago
>It's like an old ASM programmer telling himself that his obscure assembly knowledge will surely still give him great advantages as he is forced to switch to React.js development. The engineers that are truly skilled in writing pure assembly wouldn't be forced to switch to React. The existence of higher level languages doesn't mean lower level languages are useless.
- cubefox 2mo ago
  I'm pretty sure that nowadays much less assembly is written than a few decades ago. Even video games used to be written in assembly. So the demand for assembly programmers went down, and the skill became less useful, unless the supply went down by the same amount.
  - yuye 2mo ago
    You're right, but that doesn't mean those assembly programmers are suddenly forced to write React. Being an expert at assembly probably means you're an expert in low level programming. We still have a need for those people, because they'll probably also be able to write C/C++/Rust/Zig/etc very competently. I consider myself pretty competent in C(And C++ to some degree), and I have a pretty good understanding of how computers work on a lower level, but if you ask me to write React UI components, I probably wouldn't fare well. I understand Javascript/Typescript, sure, but I'm just not familiar with the best practices of modern day frontend engineering.
    - cubefox 2mo ago

imtringued 2mo ago

My big problem is that nobody is working on truly innovative programming languages anymore. Everyone wants to build another iteration of a C style language with incremental improvement for little benefit. The problem is that we probably reached the general purpose frontier a long time ago and there are just a few surface level things that need to be changed here and there, which is not worth a whole new language. It goes against the programmer's ego, but the way forward is by adding more restrictions. The people complaining about the borrow checker in Rust just don't get it. If you want programming to improve, you will have to give up the ability to write every conceivable program.

yuye 2mo ago
>My big problem is that nobody is working on truly innovative programming languages anymore. How many languages are truly innovative? I'd say the most recent example is Rust, as you mentioned, being innovative with its borrow checker, but what other recent languages really are? Many modern languages are not innovative, but just add quality of life features. A good example is Kotlin: Just another JVM language, nothing revolutionary, but I enjoy writing it over Java. >It goes against the programmer's ego, but the way forward is by adding more restrictions. The people complaining about the borrow checker in Rust just don't get it. If you want programming to improve, you will have to give up the ability to write every conceivable program. I agree and also disagree. The "ability to write every conceivable program" also means writing programs that are faulty. Maybe that's your point, in which case I don't consider it a bad thing to limit the ability to do so. A language like C let's you fuck around and find out. It's powerful and "easy". As the saying goes, it gives you a gun and doesn't stop you from shooting yourself in the foot.

jthomastelles 2mo ago

[dead]

Alfredo66 2mo ago

[flagged]