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by fcatalan 92 days ago
A couple weeks ago on a lark I asked Claude/Gemini/Codex to hallucinate a language they would like to program in and they always agreed on strong types, contracts, verification, proving and testing. So they ended up brainstorming a weird Forth-like with all those on top. I then kept prodding for an implementation and burned my weekly token budget until a lot of the language worked. They called it Cairn.

So now I prompted this: "can you generate a fizzbuzz implementation in Cairn that showcases as much as possible the TEST/PROVE/VERIFY characteristics of the language? "

Producing this (working) monstrosity (can't paste here, it's 200+ lines of crazy): https://gist.github.com/cairnlang/a7589de126b14e50a53b9bdc28...
1 comments
bizzletk 92 days ago
How would you compare it to similar things in this space like Mog?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47312728

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fcatalan 92 days ago
Same originating idea: "a language for AI to write in" but then everything else is different.

The features of both are quite orthogonal. Cairn is a general purpose language with features that help in writing probably working code. Mog is more like "let's constraint our features so bad code can't do much but trade that for good agent ergonomy".

Cairn is a crazy sprawling idea, Mog is a little attempt at something limited but practical.

Mog seems like something someone has thought about. No one has thought about Cairn, it's pure LLM hallucination, the fact that it exists and can do a lot of stuff it's just the result of someone (me) not knowing when a joke has gone too far.

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