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Comment by joshmarinacci | Hacker News Reader

Programming language innovation is measured in decades. I expect LLMs will make it easier to prototype new concepts, but adoption will still progress on a human timescale

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If LLMs are writing code, won't adoption progress on LLM-timescales? Humans would seem to be out of the equation.

The marketing pitch for these things was that they were supposed to induce "cambrian explosion of creations". That there was zero barrier to building anything anymore. This is surely true in programming languages especially, considering how fast LLMs took over software development? Surely this would mean we would get new ideas faster if that was the case? There is literally nothing stopping language designers from getting new concepts out there now even if nobody is using them in production yet.

> LLMs will make it easier to prototype new concepts,

So where are these prototypes?

https://www.reddit.com/r/AIprogrammingLanguage/

We don’t need new ideas, we need languages that take the best ideas developed over the past decade of PL research and operationalize them in a language with modern tooling and build support.

> That there was zero barrier to building anything anymore. ... Surely this would mean we would get new ideas faster if that was the case?

No, of course not. The point is that the tools comprehend the idea and implement it. Not that they have the idea for you.

> So where are these prototypes?

I'm working on one, but you're not going to like it.

Maybe the marketing pitch, like many other pitches, was a lie?

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