Evolving programming languages in the AI era

(dashbit.co)

24 points | by pjm331 1 day ago

3 comments

  • moritzwarhier 23 minutes ago
    This is corporate/grifter blogspam and reading it in full is a symptom of extreme gullibleness.

    The topic is interesting, the text is pure spam.

    As usual with people whose primary goal is to make money.

  • imtringued 14 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 56 minutes 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 47 minutes 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 43 minutes ago
          > Once you get into the third party

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

    • jacquesm 52 minutes 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 1 minute 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?
      • kloop 39 minutes ago
        Because human review is a serious bottleneck and optimizing something that isn't the bottleneck isn't helpful
    • pjm331 1 hour 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 33 minutes 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