One thing I haven't heard discussed much about LLM-based programming:

Are we at the end of any serious programming language evolution?

It seems to me that if you believe (a) coding assistants are going to be the dominant way software is written, and (b) the only way to get reasonably good coding assistants is to train on tons of existing code, then it follows that (c) new programming languages will be at a significant disadvantage because there's just no corpus to train on.

The strong version of this hypothesis is that even new features of existing programming languages will be hard to roll out, because the bots won't use them!

I'm sure there are researchers who are looking at "programming languages that are easy for coding assistants to write" (Darklang went this route) but I think this is futile as long as (b) is our best bet. Maybe "AI" will deliver general reasoning capabilities good enough to transfer to any language, but that's not what is shaking out right now.

Any studies on coding assistant success across existing languages? That might be interesting to look at.

#CodingAssistants #ProgrammingLanguages