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Comment by ericpauley | Hacker News Reader

I think (outside hobbies) new programming language development is basically dead at this point. The major use cases have been filled, and there are more forces than ever towards using a battle-tested language with a massive ecosystem. Further, less and less code is being written or read by humans so the actual language ergonomics matter less than ever to those who would fund new language creation.

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The major use cases have not been filled, only the major corporate use cases. That doesn't mean there aren't still major gaps to be filled now, or that the current use cases won't evolve in the future.

This talk argues there are many purposes for formal languages other than programming: https://medium.com/bits-and-behavior/my-splash-2016-keynote-...

So it may be true that "programming language" development is done, but there are many more applications for formal languages than just writing apps and websites and such.

Moreover, it may be true that less code as a proportion of all code is being written or read by humans. But more humans today are reading and writing code than ever before. So the ability to express unambiguous ideas to agents using formal langauges is more important than ever, even if people are only reading/writing a small proportion of all code.

Similarly, it's not true that because agents will be reading / writing code that language ergonomics do not matter. Agents have resource restrictions like token budgets, and they are also trained using human knowledge and conventions. Ergonomics apply to agents just as they do humans; languages which are verbose require more tokens to write, languages that can be verified are more useful in agentic loops, languages with live compiler introspection and interpreters can give fast results to agents etc.

So I hold exactly the opposite view: it's not clear to me why languages built 30 years ago in a world where the Internet barely existed would be accidentally ideal for AI agents in 2026 to the pint we can say the whole field is solved for good (and no, I don't think the amount of training data on those languages seals the fate because that status is ephemeral and also it's not clear training on one language corpus isn't transferrable to other languages).

For gamedev scripting, the gap has not been filled yet. Lua is good for embedding but the language itself is terrible for LLM usage (too much dynamic typing). C# is too heavy for scripting usage (long compile times, clunky to embed into a C++ engine), and other alternatives (AngelScript, daScript, ...) are just too niche.

What about Python? LLMs seem to like it well enough.

Slow and not so operable with C/C++

Slow I'll grant you, but I assumed for scripting use cases that didn't matter so much.

It doesn't matter that much. Probably 10x slower than C++/Rust is fine. 100x is a bit much though.

This is not my area, but what about Rust or Odin?

Rust is slow to compile, and not that productive when writing gameplay code (see https://loglog.games/blog/leaving-rust-gamedev/)

Odin... technically not a scripting language, and haven't used it that much. But if compile times are good enough and hot reloading works, might worth a try. Though I think manual memory management can be antithetical when churning out gameplay code quickly (or when you're working with game designers with minimal background in programming)

Thanks. I know that there are things that can be done to bring down the compile speed of Rust, like splitting a project into sub crates. But I agree with the post that you linked. Game dev, especially UI and game mechanics benefits from a high degree of polish. You just can't realistically get that with compile times in the 10s of seconds. The most polished game I've played, Balatro, was built using Lua and Love2D specifically because of the iteration speed that they made possible.

Why is daScript too niche?? Gamedev scripting itself is a niche, what can't you do in daScript or what would you not want to do in daScript?

daScript looks very complete

Niche as in... I haven't heard anyone using it except for the studio that made it (Gaijin Entertainment). Might be a good language (at least from what the docs suggest), but needs some marketing to increase adoption...

This gives me "why build dropbox" energy.

We never know when a revelation or unmet customer niche arrives around the corner. Never bet against it.

...to have C0ndi on the board to allow the gov't complete access and data retention for ever and ever under a mountain

> new programming language development is basically dead at this point

I think it's the opposite. For the projects that warrant it (usually games), it has never been easier to create a custom embeddable scripting language. It was always somewhat common to have custom languages, specially if the game is open to mods and/or allows users to create custom maps, but now that's easier than ever to do.

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