alt Hacker News> I fear LLMs have frozen programming language advancement and adoption for anything past 2021.
Why would that be the case? Many models have knowledge cutoffs in this calendar year. Furthermore I’ve found that LLMs are generally pretty good at picking up new (or just obscure) languages as long as you have a few examples. As wide and varied as programming languages are, syntactically and ideologically they can only be so different.
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The motivation isn’t there to create new languages for humans when you’re programming at a higher level of abstraction now (AI prompting).
It’d be like inventing a new assembly language when everyone is writing code in higher level languages that compile to assembly.
I hope it’s not true, but I believe that’s what OP meant and I think the concern is valid!
There's a flywheel where programmers choose languages that LLMs already understand, but LLMs can only learn languages that programmers write a sufficient amount of code in.
Because LLMs make it that much faster to develop software, any potential advantage you may get from adopting a very niche language is overshadowed by the fact that you can't use it with an LLM. This makes it that much harder for your new language to gain traction. If your new language doesn't gain enough traction, it'll never end up in LLM datasets, so programmers are never going to pick it up.