19 points nchagnet 54 minutes ago 8 comments

nchagnet 54 minutes ago | parent

I wrote this to show my appreciation of this small-ish but beautiful language.

micbas 13 minutes ago | parent

Naive question: why do we care about programming languages when we no longer read programming languages directly? Shouldn't we either design languages optimized for LLMs? (needs fewer tokens, easier for bots to process, easier to machine verify, not sure what else)

profunctor 8 minutes ago | parent

We do still read code. Most people are not doing a fully unseen development strategy because we have needs around efficiency, security, compliance etc and we can’t simply blame it on our agents like we don’t control them like OpenAI do

pjmlp 2 minutes ago | parent

That is like arguing everyone should master Assembly when using high level languages. :)

WJW 3 minutes ago | parent

Who's this "we" you speak about. There is a small subset of programmers who have become effectively become managers and ask their AI employees to do things. The rest of us still regularly read and write code.

logophobia 1 minute ago | parent

I mean, even if you've stopped even reading code (good luck with that), the right abstraction should make things things easier for the LLM. A good rich type system to stop incorrect code, linters to catch common errors. A good set of battery-included system libraries. BEAM should provide a good abstraction for highly parallel and distributed systems, which means the LLM doesn't need to build all those abstractions itself. If you're building a distributed system, it should be like providing a set of good guardrails, guiding the LLM in building a correct system.

I've seen even the best models try to build & debug parallel and distributed systems. The results are always a bit uneven at best, even with a good harness and a lot of guidance.

The disadvantage of niche languages is that the LLM won't quite know the language as well due to less training data being available. But if you actually need to build something distributed, then this might be a good trade-off.

Gualdrapo 41 seconds ago | parent

adamddev1 1 minute ago | parent

Gleam is really a delightful language with great ideas, but the lack of currying is a tragedy.

Missing currying feels a little to me like walking in FP land with one leg cut off.