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Comment by giraffe_lady | Hacker News Reader

I'm pretty sure that's the general trend and it will continue.

But I do think what benefits LLMs is the speed and accuracy of feedback. Type systems cover the accuracy part, but haskell was killing them on speed. It seems like a strange choice to go so far the other way on accuracy when there's a lot of languages in between. But I'm not familiar with the project so not in a position to call it.

It's not also really about expressiveness IMO. I've found LLMs to be best with more constrained type systems: they are better at ocaml than they are at typescript.

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Java can also have 15+ minute cold compiles on large projects if you kill all caches. It's less bad on smaller codebases because you don't have to recompile dependencies if you target a bytecode vm, but if you always gate feedback on a cold compile in a fresh VM you just aren't gonna beat an interpreted language

But I'd look at people a bit oddly if they said: 'We didn't want to set up CI caching and compiled languages took 30 minutes per run so we changed our entire codebase to python'.

Maybe it makes sense for them, and caching across dynamically spawned VM's is admittedly a harder problem which most build systems aren't great at, but still. I can easily believe that getting build caching to be reliable would be a lot of work, but is it more work than a full rewrite of a significant codebase?

Additionally in modern Java there are even the options of AOT and JIT caches, which can be reused across runs.

Or if staying on Linux, JVM snapshots.

javac doesn't really do a whole lot. Consequently, whatever compile time you are complaining about would be worse with any other compiled language. Most optimization work in Java happens at runtime.

First of all I am not complaining about anything.

Secondly, there are several ways how Java source code becomes machine code, depending on which JVM and JDK is being used, not taking into account the ART cousin.

> I've found LLMs to be best with more constrained type systems: they are better at ocaml than they are at typescript.

When the potential set of behaviors you could write a program to have is infinite, but the actual behavior you want is singular, a programming language is more importantly defined by which ones it eliminates up front than which ones it lets you write (assuming it lets you write the one you want at all, but that's almost always going to be the case for most general purpose languages). Bugs are just false positives in this framing, where the program you wrote seems like the one you wanted, but there's some divergence between what you thought you were getting and what you actually got, and catching some of those up front is a huge part of why type systems are so useful.

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