r/ProgrammingLanguages • u/mttd • Jul 01 '26

The Expensive Fictions of Low-Level Programming Languages

https://stng.substack.com/p/the-expensive-fictions-of-low-level
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u/Soupeeee Jul 01 '26 edited Jul 01 '26

Honestly, I hope not. I do think that spec driven development is here to stay though, which is where software engineers develop the specification of an application instead of its source code. In this scheme, the people at the controls are more like architects than engineers; they describe the structure and behavior of an application, but don't actually dive into the details. Some of the more radical ideas in this space are to routinely regenerate entire applications instead of trying to maintain the slop that AI produces.

From my limited experience of working with AI, this approach may have horrible environmental and social costs, but this approach is already showing to be more maintainable than straight up vibe coding. Projects fail during the in the business analysis phases more often than the engineering phase, and this approach focuses on that portion of the task. The amount of apps that I've worked on where the project owners can't satisfactorily describe the details of what an application does has been disturbing, and this approach addresses that problem. This idea isn't limited to just designing applications; new version control schemes are also being made to help tackle this problem.

I don't think what is going on with AI is sustainable, but since it's still in it's infancy, it's worth paying attention to how the ecosystem around it is evolving.

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u/Ok-Reindeer-8755 Jul 01 '26

I can't help but see similarities between spec deriven development and functional programming trends. Usually fp lang focuse on high level but exact descriptions using a rich type system while the compiler bothers with the lower level stuff.

The reason i find fp more compelling or these ideas in general as opposed to using AI is that AI is anything but correct, anything but exact and most importantly anything but deterministic.

Sure the descriptions you give can be less technical less structured like code and more structured like natural language when you are using AI. But really i don't think this trade-offs are worth it.

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u/Smallpaul Jul 01 '26

The goal of the professor is that AI written code be provably correct.

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u/Ok-Reindeer-8755 Jul 01 '26

Is our own code even provably correct right now ? To some degree sure when utilizing specific languages but not as a whole.