[drewm1980]

I have the opposite gut feeling about LLM's; I think they're going to break down the barriers to adopting new programming languages, since they'll lower the cost of porting code dramatically.

The code in a language's standard library is probably enough to train an LLM on the new syntax, and even if it isn't, agents now observe the compiler output and can in principle learn from it. Porting code from one language to another doesn't require deep creativity and is, barring API aesthetics, a perfectly well defined task. It will be one of the first programming tasks to be perfectly automated by LLM's.

We are going to have to use our brains again to start thinking about why we're doing any of the stuff we're doing, and what effects it will have on the world.

[daxfohl]

I hope so! On one hand I worry about the training corpus being so overwhelmingly biased toward certain languages that everything else will be drowned out. On the other, I think there'll be a point where we realize "reasoning" LLMs are more proficient with the same tools that we are: sound type systems, reusable libraries, concise syntax, DSLs where they make sense, etc. that the end game will look much more like skilled, experienced, thoughtful engineering work rather than the first of ten billion autocomplete attempts that happened to get something that met the basic requirements.

[gavinray]

This a genuine and major reason why I stick to popular languages and tools now.

With how increasingly automated my code authorship is, reliability and training data matter a LOT.