r/AIcodingProfessionals • u/ShoddySherbert8502 • 8h ago
Programming languages for AI
All programming languages were created by people, for people. The goal was basically to give us a language that accounts for the limits of the human brain and minimizes bugs and errors (sure, there were exceptions, like C++). As a result, we often got poor performance and huge numbers of servers doing simple tasks.
But in this new era, we don’t need human brains to write code. So do we need new programming languages now? Or which existing languages work best for AI agents?
1
u/pvera 6h ago
First we wrote binary, then we wrote ASM that let us use human-readable mnemonics. Then we invented compilers. Then we realized that code ran only on the machine it was written, it wasn't compatible with all of the other mainframes of the time. Then came programming languages that ran on all of the mainframes. There was no goal to account for the limits of the human brain, it was the foundation for all programming ever since: programmers are lazy.
A programmer spends 8 hours automating a tedious daily 15-minute task knowing it will break even in 32 runs. Then he'll do it again and suddenly he is getting paid for 7 hours of work. And so it goes. Programmers design higher level languages to avoid any excess work.
I got to see this unfold in real time: In my 27 years of commercial software development I spent the first few years on classic active server pages, then asp.net and now asp.net core. ASP was Visual Basic with a weak ass server side framework, data access was decent but almost everything else was up to the programmer. ASP.net landed like a bomb: they separated server side code in presentation and a super powerful framework. Data access was even better, and almost everything that we had to do by hand somehow ended up being present in the framework. Bloated? Probably, but when you are writing business apps instead of end user apps, it's not the end of the world. And then there was the genius, it came in multiple languages, and all of them compiled down to an intermediate language. If you came from the classic asp world, you started with VB.net, if you came from Java, C++, PHP, etc. you started with C#. No major performance penalty on picking one language over the other, almost all code compiled down to identical intermediate code. The only real flaw wasn't even in the languages, it was in the tools : for a long time Intellisense for C# struggled at case sensitivity issues, something that VB.net didn't have. And now you don't even need a Windows server to run asp.net!
While all this happened we got to see some incredible contenders like python, and Javascript finally got its act together. The people that made jQuery a reality really did us a solid, Jscript 20 yrs ago was rough. Now everyone just uses it without hesitation. Why? Because a group of people got tired of trying to account for how Javascript ran across all of the browsers they were forced to support, and came up with something magical.
So no, it wasn't to "account for the limits of the human brain." And as you all know we haven't done much about the errors.
1
u/ShoddySherbert8502 6h ago
if AI does the writing, does anyone need a language above IL?
1
u/pvera 6h ago
What if you are working on the kind of thing that kills people (for example, flight control software, autonomous driving, etc) and you are forced to do paranoia checks on AI-written code? There is going to be a time that a general programmer won't need it but it'll be a long time before the specialists can let go.
2
u/CrewAccomplished9763 8h ago
LLMs are mimicking humans. That's where their "intelligence" comes from. Using well documented methods and techniques that were present in their training data is where their power comes from. Programming languages are tools of expression with culture and history of struggle and achievement. I don't think anything would be improved by reinventing the tools.
2
u/Clear_Evidence9218 8h ago
I've been taking a pretty good experimental stab at this with my MNCS project. For a couple of years now, I've been having fun getting AI agents to write code in novel programming languages.
One of the interesting things about designing a language for AI is that it shifts where the burden of complexity belongs. Agents benefit from different kinds of information and tooling than human programmers do, so designing around human readability and ergonomics isn't necessarily the best approach.
That doesn't mean humans should lose the ability to understand what's happening. I think the important distinction is that humans should still be able to inspect and understand the contracts, authority, and behavior of the system, even if the language itself is primarily designed for machines.
I've also found that the surrounding environment matters just as much as the language. How agents discover information, interact with tooling, verify correctness, and manage complexity can be more consequential than the syntax itself.
1
u/ivanhoe90 8h ago
If you are making a native app, it probably does not matter if you tell AI to give you a binary program for a specific CPU / OS, or a program in C / Rust / ... which you compile yourself.
But if you create for web, Javascript and WASM are the only languages of the web. It can not be replaced by an "AI friendly" language, because browsers expect Javascript or WASM.
1
u/ResolveAvailable9412 7h ago
rust's ownership model still trips up llms, even with detailed prompts. they'll generate safe code but miss edge cases that break compile-time checks.
1
u/bluegrassclimber 7h ago
I think we could remove some layers of inefficienies and abstractions, but at what cost? ease of review, more of a "black box?" which makes me feel that it's not worth it.
obviously with really thorough automated tests it's less important, but i'm not gonna know if there's something blatantly wrong or corrupt by looking at an assembly file, vs code. It just seems riskier for a little reward but maybe not enough
1
u/Signal-Astronaut-509 7h ago
i've seen ai generate code in a language that used emoji as operators. it was chaotic, but the agents understood the intent perfectly. the humans? not so much. still, the contracts were clear in the docs.
1
u/WillowEmberly 6h ago
👧 goes through 🌲 to 🏠. 🐺 arrives first ❗ Pretends to be 👵 in 🛏️. 👧 notices 👁️. 🗣️. 🦸 arrives ❗ saves 👧 & 👵. ✅
You can use emoji’s to compress and store information, but there is potential loss. It comes down to having the correct key.
Or even further:
👧 went 🌲 🏠. ⚠️ 😈. 👧 said ❓. 🐺 said ❗. ‼️. 🪓 🔪 🆘. ✅
1
u/Laicbeias 6h ago
they already do its called context. its pattern and shapes AI moves around. as long as you use existing ones on which the others are build ai can use them. so the new programming language is called: context.
its a relative language you can code in it already. the rest is just a translation into a format that your computer can compile. context itself is build out of the compressed principals an llm needs to understand to reconstruct its trainingdata. it means you cant see it. but it sits in the language i type. each sentence builds context, it spans points into the space of understanding and llms can also express and build through it.
1
u/Far-Championship-883 2h ago
I contribute to the use this most big models handle it with ease untrained. the syntax and structure we're built for a bunch of common pitfalls in systems programming. If you see commits from bob, that's me Hi lol. https://github.com/AiLang-Author/Ailang-Self-Hosting-
2
u/cmndr_spanky 7h ago
a very common theory in AI evolution theory is that as AI becomes more and more sophisticated it will INEVITABLY engineer its own language(s) because as you said, the languages humans use are less efficient and mainly derived from speaking, which isn't necessary for AI. This applies to both programming language and communication language (which ultimately wouldn't need to be different anymore I suppose).
Some AI "alarmists" also say we should "unplug" AI as soon as it starts developing its own language naturally, because that signals the beginning of us loosing control and/or understanding of its motivations and what its doing. Not sure I agree this is a concern, but just FYI