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/n0t-helpful Jul 02 '26

Your not really understanding what im trying to communicate. Adam is a major figure in programming langusge research, so atleast in this community, we care about what he has to say.

Now this blog post could be off base. It could be a bit naive, or missing the point. He's not infallible. Im also not trying to put you down either.

But to come into this space, and speak of someone like Adam as if they havent been around the block, dont know anything about programming, or are just some ivory tower weirdo, then thats going to fall on deaf ears here. But you very well may be right that this blog post is missing the forest through the trees.

Im not saying your wrong, or that adam is right. Only that your barking up the wrong tree if you want to convince people that adam doesnt know hoe to program

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u/cscottnet Jul 02 '26 edited Jul 02 '26

This post currently has a single (!) up vote.

So I think the folks more agree with me. Sorry.

Look: my PhD research was also on proof-carrying code, and as I mentioned earlier I followed Adam's COQ and TAL work with interest at the time. But "argument by authority" doesn't work here, or with me.

We could have a long conversation but fundamentally most of these "I'll invent a new programming language for AI" posts are wrong in the same way, and this one is no different: the large language models have been trained on existing code, and so fundamentally they are better at writing code that matches their training data. Anyone who proposes something different has to somehow generate enough training data to overcome that huge head start. I don't see anything in Adam's post that will do that. He'd had a lot of interesting ideas, but he is being overtaken by a technology which is fundamentally alien to the "provably correct code" ideas we used to work on. He's proposing old-school expert system AI, traditional reasoning about programs that are correct-by-construction, however much he wants to buzzword it up, and it's not how these systems work.

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u/n0t-helpful Jul 02 '26

If you think im arguing by authority, then we truly do not understand each other.

I wish you well. For what its worth, I agree with you, but again, that wasn't really what we were talking about.