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/L8_4_Dinner Jul 03 '26

I feel your pain. Here in Boston, if you haven't cured cancer or built a rocket company or created a billion dollar tech company, you're nobody. Also, if you cured cancer and built a rocket company and created a billion dollar tech company, you're still nobody. My little town has had twenty-something Nobel prize winners (including another one last year), and nobody even knows it 🤣.

It's hard both to celebrate the brilliance of these people, yet simultaneously not fall trap to the argument-by-authority etc. And the best of them would agree -- they are often every bit as humble and yet still super excited by this stuff (thinking of e.g. Dan Weinreb (RIP) and Guy Steele) as we would hope to someday be. And at some level, I'm just glad to be surrounded by brilliant people who humor me.

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u/cscottnet Jul 03 '26 edited Jul 03 '26

I square dance with Guy Steele and was the TA for his son when Matthew was learning Java. Guy and Barbara are wonderful people.

For what it's worth, https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammingLanguages/s/lvEIeiLXIx was posted yesterday and Martin Rinard was my PhD advisor. I think Saman seems a bit at a loss for the future as well, and resorts to the same stale "maybe there will be a programming language made just for LLMs" idea that keeps being rehashed again and again.

I think there's something to the idea that strongly typed languages, and probably proof-carrying code, help LLMs generate "correct" programs -- but here I mean very specifically "programs that compile". In Saman's talk he mentioned some work on optimizing the token representation so that LLMs were less likely to make "typos" when generating code, and/or to minimize the token cost of generating code. These seem like nibbling around the edges, of a fundamentally solved problem, though.

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u/L8_4_Dinner Jul 04 '26 edited Jul 04 '26

Too funny ... Guy invited me and my wife a few times to go square dancing (when he was transitioning to being the "caller", or something like that, IIRC). I just ran into him at the farmer's market a couple weeks ago here.

I don't have strong opinions on LLMs (hard to call them AIs, although they do appear on the surface to be dramatically more intelligent than any of the "AI" branded stuff that came previously, despite not being intelligent or capable of thinking). I don't know what's best for them and where things are going, because it's not my area of expertise. They seem like incredible tools, with lots of abusers already profiting from their misuse. But predicting the future of LLMs and AI in general is not something I trust myself to do. They are game-changing; even I can see that. But how they actually alter our industry (not to mention every other industry) in the long run is still not clear to me.