Evolving programming languages in the AI era

imtringued•about 15 hours ago

>This creates an interesting tension. Coding agents could dramatically reduce the cost of building an ecosystem while simultaneously weakening one of the forces that causes ecosystems to form in the first place.

This is deeply unintuitive but AI negates language specific ecosystems, while strengthening language agnostic ecosystems.

Pick whatever your favourite programming language is and its ecosystem. With AI someone can take your ecosystem and just port it to their language.

This means the only way you can protect your ecosystem is to play on all language fronts at the same time so porting the software to another language becomes a meaningless exercise.

andriy_koval•about 1 hour ago

> With AI someone can take your ecosystem and just port it to their language.

I don't think its that "just". Examples of porting we seen had some prerequisites: being self contained with very strong tests coverage, so AI could iterate N millions times and fix bugs in new implementation. Otherwise such porting could be very buggy and unmaintainable.

3eb7988a1663•about 1 hour ago

Don't all of "serious" programming languages meet that bar? Java, C#, Go, Python, etc all have enormous test suites. Once you get into the third party, things become much more uneven, but if you can restrict yourself to say the top N packages in a language, those are going to have better than average development practices which makes that plausible.

andriy_koval•about 1 hour ago

> Once you get into the third party

year, that's usually what is referred as ecosystem.

jacquesm•about 1 hour ago

Why even assume that the most optimal programming languages for agentic coding are the ones that humans use? Maybe operate on ASTs directly? Some other form of programming that humans would find hard but that is a good fit for LLMs?

refactor_master•34 minutes ago

AI still makes mistakes on code with a trillion billion examples, but let’s invent a DSL that only AI can read and hope for the best?

jacquesm•27 minutes ago

Yes, because that code was never written to be understood by machines, merely to be mechanically translated. Software is a very messy set of layers of leaky abstractions trying to express reasonably well defined ideas. Humans can't write code without mistakes, in spite of all the examples out there. If they could compilers wouldn't have to emit error messages.

kloop•about 1 hour ago

Because human review is a serious bottleneck and optimizing something that isn't the bottleneck isn't helpful

pjm331•about 2 hours ago

I’m not sure. my read of this was that AI weakens human ecosystems in general because we don’t need to work together as much when we are all just working with AI separately, but maybe you have specific examples of language agnostic ecosystems in mind? I’m struggling to imagine what that would look like

verdverm•about 1 hour ago

maybe more like an ecosystem around a framework implemented in multiple language SDKs, here are two I use

https://adk.dev/

https://docs.dagger.io/reference/sdks

both can invoke modules written in other languages from your language of choice

Kubernetes is likely an interesting ecosystem to consider under this lens too

Evolving programming languages in the AI era

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