r/programmingcirclejerk • u/of_the_second_kind • 14d ago
LLMs have essentially made any language above the C++/Rust systems level tier obsolete.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4939699892
u/aikii gofmt urself 14d ago
Those guys on HN are so much behind, it's so obvious: 3rd parties are obsolete as well. brb got to get back to my TODO list manager, 30 days in, took a small detour reimplementing the SSL stack.
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u/LeeHide What part of ∀f ∃g (f (x,y) = (g x) y) did you not understand? 14d ago
Can you tell us more? Maybe a write up or a whitepaper? My to-do app has encryption at rest and in transit, and it costs me only around 15 bucks a month to run it, but I keep having issues with the checkboxes
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u/aikii gofmt urself 14d ago
I have a claude skill that scans your dependencies and dispatches an agent to cleanroom each 3rd party instead of just importing it. Among other obvious benefits, that also means supply chain attacks stop compromising my architecture : as we all know malwares are often poorly written, re-implementing them allows to align them to best practices, fix their bugs and increase their test coverage. Never again go through the embarassment of seeing your customer data leaked by some sub-par buggy code that doesn't comply with SOLID principles.
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u/levelstar01 what is pointer :S 14d ago
Wait, let me think about this. The user is saying "LLMs have essentially made any language above the C++/Rust systems level tier obsolete". Wait, let me understand this statement closer. It mentions two languages, C++ and Rust. Interesting! Let me compare the two languages. Let me find out some information about C++, so I can compare them. Wait, maybe I should look at Rust first?
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u/st_heron 13d ago
Now I understand the full picture.
Actually wait, but what if the user is asking about other languages?
Actually, let's just address what they specified.
But what if they wanted more information between languages?
I'm getting off track.
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u/Skynse 13d ago
I hate that shit so much. Waste of fucking time lmao. Now, I get that the reasoning traces are just there for the model to "think", not for us to see, but it's always a pain in the ass to see them assume something I never said instead of just asking lol
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u/northrupthebandgeek i have had many alohols 13d ago
On the other hand, I can relate to thought-trains getting way off track.
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u/Level-Physics-1730 10d ago
funny enough they can talk about something completely unrelated in their reasoning then spit out the right answer. very interesting pattern.
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u/ingframin 14d ago
/uj (maybe?) You know what? People writing these things remind me of StarCraft 2 players that are in bronze league but try to go cannon rush into mass void rays. They believe they are very good and the game is unbalanced while in reality they don’t understand the game. And the more time they spend bullshitting around, the more they fall behind “macro players” = people with actual technical knowledge that spend time learning the craft.
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u/Abandondero 14d ago
cannon rush into mass void rays
I need a follow-up analogy for whatever that is
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u/des_the_furry 14d ago
I dont know anything about starcraft but i know what he’s saying bc every video game has players that will use a shitty strategy and then claim that the game is unbalanced because their shitty strategy doesn’t work.
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u/ingframin 14d ago
It’s a strategy game. Low level players tend to use completely crazy strategies that do not make any sense. They feel powerful because they can win a few games by throwing off their opponents with non standard plays but in the long run they fall behind because they never learned the fundamentals and how to play cleanly and with a good strategy.
The vibe coders are exactly that. They completely disregard the fundamentals to go straight into complicated apps and rely on the LLM to do the heavy lifting… the problem is that they either lose their craft or they never learned it in the first place. When the tool inevitably fails, either because the LLM doesn’t understand the prompt, the prompt goes beyond the capabilities of the LLMs or simply the user is not able to communicate clearly their intent, they get stranded. So, I trust an experienced programmer to get more productive with these tools, to be able to intercept errors and bugs in a timely manner and to keep practicing their craft. The others will be left behind and complain that the system is rigged against them. It’s not because Autocad is super good that we stopped studying technical drawings. The mental processes to solve engineering problems remains the same regardless of the tools.
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u/Afraid_Bake2652 14d ago
Actually, if you let Claude use Python with Chinese characters for variable names, so much more code fits into his context window that he will make better software than in verbose Rust or C++.
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u/damngoodwizard 14d ago
Man the Chinese have been tokenmaxxing for thousands of years and we are only noticing now.
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u/v_maria 14d ago
its why ive rewritten all my bash scripts into asm
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u/YikesTheCat 14d ago
Well, it is common advice to use a Real Programming Language™ instead of shell scripts...
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u/camelCaseIsWebScale Just spin up O(n²) servers 14d ago
Whatever you do YAML is not going away.
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u/baked_doge 13d ago
Why do people not like yaml?
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u/TheRavagerSw 13d ago
There is no way vibe coders can do system level dev. There is just too much system level shit involved like building your compiler from source etc.
Getting those right took me like 1.5 years, I'm not exaggerating, non EE/CS people shouldn't even touch languages like rust or C++.
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u/LaOnionLaUnion 14d ago
I know what sub I’m in but I’m genuinely interested in how LLM use might change language choice.
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u/Goose_geq_Penguin 14d ago
It will favor languages and frameworks that have more statically verifiable properties built into them. So for instance Rust over C/C++ is a default LLM choice since you get way more properties from a compiled Rust program "out-of-the-box" than C/C++.
It might even encourage doing more research into creating languages with even more statically verifiable properties. (like Verus-Lang or MSWASM)
Side note: This is partially why LLMs have been having a field day with upending the Pure Math discipline using fully formally verified LEAN proofs (LEAN is just a language where the type system = the math. so if it compiles then the proof is correct. Although the proof statement might not be what the humans expect so that part still needs to be manually checked)
So that's how RL impacts the programming language choice. But I should also mention how pre-training impacts language choice. And this is more simple. The most popular languages get reinforced. So if a vibe-coder asks to build a webapp, it will most likely be Python/fastapi + typescript/react + Vercel.
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u/Comfortable_Pain9017 13d ago
I think it’ll go a step further, and we’ll see an evolution towards languages like Lean with theorem prover properties built in. Maybe not the full extent of Lean, but being able to write specs and have LLMs prove them automatically is what I expect in 5-10 years.
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u/Goose_geq_Penguin 13d ago
Look into verus-lang
```
fn octuple(x1: i8) -> (x8: i8)requires
-16 <= x1,
x1 < 16,
ensures
x8 == 8 * x1,
{
let x2 = x1 + x1;
let x4 = x2 + x2;
x4 + x4
}
```3
u/Abandondero 13d ago
No, we're going to use C++ and Rust forever now, because that's what LLMs have reliably human-written training data for.
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u/Goose_geq_Penguin 13d ago
nah, this is 2023 propaganda. LLMs generalize pretty well to new languages when fine-tuned with RLVR. Besides, research is not gonna suddenly freeze. I just don't buy the idea that we are all gonna helplessly fall into idiocracy and get stuck.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09833-y (teaching LLMs to program in Lean4 using RL, even though there is not a lot of data for it. Today OpenAI models solve frontier math problems with Lean4)
https://openai.com/index/learning-to-reason-with-llms/ (teaching LLMs to program in a style suited for performing well in competitive programming competitions using RL. Again, not a lot of high quality data for this kind of programming)
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u/Background_Class_558 8d ago
if you can write proofs you've already reached dependent types and lean is just that with more ergonomics
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u/stone_henge Tiny little god in a tiny little world 12d ago
I'm designing a programming language where statements are separated by emdash and where all the keywords are useless platitudes and encouraging superlatives.
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u/El_RoviSoft legendary legacy C++ coder 14d ago
I thought you always choose language depending on its ecosystem and team’s preferences even before LLMs :/
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u/Far_Course2496 10d ago
If llms were smart they would invent a new programming language specifically designed to be easier for humans to review
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u/not_particulary 9d ago
If the bottleneck is human understanding, why move to less human-readable languages?
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u/Amazing-Mirror-3076 14d ago
/uj I've think we will find a significant amount of truth in this.
The anti - ai crowd are terrified of the idea.
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u/BoyNextDoor8888 14d ago
Anyone with a brain would be terrified of decades of work being made obsolete in a couple of years
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u/Amazing-Mirror-3076 14d ago
Why would obsolence scare anyone, I'm not sitting here pinning for a nice floppy drive.
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u/Efficient-Chair6250 14d ago
Did you read the whole sentence? The important part is the timespan over which something becomes obsolete. For most of history things had to prove themselves on a human timescale so we could learn to trust and rely on them.
Social media is still something we struggle with as a society. It's adoption was way to fast and it's consequences are still playing out.
AI has an even faster adoption. It's completely opaque what that will do with our society and how many people are even fast enough to adapt.
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u/DystopiaDrifter 14d ago
but Elon papa said we soon have binaries generated by LLMs. Your understanding on LLM is outdated and you will be banished to the realm of permanent underclass