Why care about programming languages

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)`).

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?

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.

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.

Why stop there though? My harness writes WAT directly and compiles with wasmtime.

It’s very fast and very difficult to read.

actor paradigm is huge for clamping down on agents

English has become the new programming language

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.

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.