[yubblegum]

One option is to adopt a front end for your language for existing (legacy) langauges that have been overwhelmingly developed by people who write using Latin letters: you type in your language and the front-end maps it to Latin letters. There are various issues here, depending on the written form of your language, however. Latin letters are effectively block type glyphs, which lends itself to programming.

Other option is for future languages to be formally specified in a globally adopted IL and then your local area geeks are responsible for writing a front-end that transpiles to that IL.

Or we could design and adopt a universal (~visual) glyph for programming. Various structural elements (think [ ], { }, < >, etc.) are pretty much that already. Then we have the (pseudo) mathematical elements (+, -, /, =) which are again universal. That leaves us with named elements which remain somewhat problematic.

In any event, all this seems to be a transitional period's grief. Very soon, you will interact in your native language with some AI and that thing will write the actual code. :)

Regardless (thinking of music notation here) programming notation is ultimately a specialized form of notation. Are you bothered by the fact that a musician in x-land has to learn the notation invented by some Europeans way back when?

[jayathra]

I love the idea of a universal intermediate language (IL) with region-specific front-ends—that could be a great way to make programming more accessible without fragmenting the ecosystem.

But with AI handling more code generation, how important will it be for people to truly understand the underlying code? Do you think AI will make coding more of a black box, or will there always be value in knowing how things work under the hood?

Music is a great comparison—eastern music notation exists in native scripts, and western pieces can be translated into it. Could programming work the same way, where the structure remains universal, but the notation adapts to different languages?

[yubblegum]

TIL - I did not know about eastern music notation. (Thanks!)

When I was young I had a vision of future programming as people in front of screens moving colorful shapes and forms (not talking visual programming here) to make 'harmonious' forms. :) The general idea being that (imo) AI is a misnomer and there is something 'special' about human intelligence. So that vision, when I tried to interpret it later, seemed to map out to something along the lines of 'aesthetic choices' on a meta-level. That is the 'thinking' machine 'state' was represented as images to humans and they made aesthetic choices, with man and machine each doing what they excel at.

But back to present reality, there is little doubt that over reliance on these tools will cause skill atrophy and at some point there will be a knowledge and comprehension disconnect between the operator of the tool and the artifacts created by it. This is likely already true for many beginners who are cranking out software using LLMs, but the overall field hasn't yet experienced it since the experienced software engineers already know and understand the code being generated; they are just using it to amplify their output. But they (imo) gained that knowledge due to years of hands on practice.

[disqard]

This is a really delayed reply, so I'm hoping you'll see this.

> people in front of screens moving colorful shapes and forms

along those lines...

> (not talking visual programming here)

...even though you wrote that, I'd like you to check this out:

https://blockstud.io/tutorial/0