alt Hacker NewsI wonder if at we are standing looking at the smoking field of programming languages created over the last 50 years and gazing at the final survivors, of which Java is definitely one.
Why would anyone create a new language now? The existing ones are "good enough", and without a body of examples for LLMs to train on, a new language has little chance getting traction.
I learned IBM /360 assembler when I started in computers a long time ago. I haven't seen a line of assembler in many decades, but I'm sure it's a viable language still if you need it.
Java has won (alongside many other winners of course), now the AI drawbridge is being raised to stop new entrants and my pick is that Java will still be here in 50 years time, it's just no humans will be creating it.
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> Why would anyone create a new language now? The existing ones are "good enough", and without a body of examples for LLMs to train on, a new language has little chance getting traction.
Compiler writing can be an art form and not all art is for mass consumption.
> Java has won (alongside many other winners of course), now the AI drawbridge is being raised to stop new entrants and my pick is that Java will still be here in 50 years time, it's just no humans will be creating it.
This makes no sense to me. If AI possesses intelligence then it should have no problem learning how to use a new language. If it doesn't possess intelligence, we shouldn't be outsourcing all of our programming to it.
Programmers would create a new language when there is a fundamental change in hardware architecture such that the assumptions underlying the old programming languages no longer apply. Java is probably a poor choice for writing software in which most computation happens on GPUs. But I agree that someone (or something) will still be using Java to write new line-of-business applications in 50 years.
Why would anyone play chess in 2010? The drawbridge is rapidly being raised on human competitiveness.
The vast majority of programming languages ever created never aspired to win and I don't think that's going to change now.
> Why would anyone create a new language now?
I'm writing my own programming language right now... which is for an intensely narrow use case, I'm building a testbed for comparing floating-point implementations without messy language semantics getting in the way.
There's lots of reasons to write your own programming language, especially since if you don't care about it actually displacing existing languages.