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amterp | 8 months ago

I've been working on a programming language for about a year which aims to replace Bash for scripting but is far closer to Python. It's something I hope to see used by many other people in the future, but a very common objection I hear from people I pitch it to is "yeah but an LLM could just generate me a Python script to do this, sure it might be uglier, twice as long, and not work quite as well, but it saved me from learning a new language and is probably fine", to which I have lots of counters on why that's a flawed argument, but it still demonstrates what I think is an increase in people's skepticism towards new languages which will contribute to the stagnation the author is talking about. If you're writing a new language, it's demotivating to see people's receptiveness to something new diminish.

I don't blame anyone in the picture, I don't disagree that time saved with LLMs can be well worth it, but it still is a topic I think we in the PL community need to wrestle more with.

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nylonstrung|8 months ago

I love your idea.

LLMs are surprisingly bad at bash and apparently very bad at Powershell

Pythonic shell scripting is well suited to their language biases right now

amterp|8 months ago

Thanks! :) Yeah in my experience they're okay at Bash but I'm never happy with the scripts it makes, I feel like the ceiling is pretty low on how good Bash scripts can get without a disproportionate amount of effort.

I'm taking a lot of inspiration from Python in the syntax and I'm actually worried it will trip up any LLM I train on my language since I think it will risk probabilistically just reverting to Python mid-answer Time will tell