Assuming that LLMs hamper gaining true experience and mastery of a language, and further assuming that LLMs will play a significant part in development (especially for juniors)… it seems to me that new programming languages and frameworks will have a significantly greater hurdle to overcome going forward, compared to what they faced in the past.
The LLM works via language. It’s…in the name. If a programming language that is more understandeable for a particular domain comes out, then LLMs will be useful for it just like humans will further appreciate it. Some languages just seriously blow for certain domains. Keep iterating. If a lnaguage is hard for people to use, it’s especially hard for an LLM to use.
There’s more to languages than ease of use. D is often cited having a “poor library infrastructure”, by those who leave it. They often deal with Rust, Go, or even C/C++ instead of writing their own libraries and/or library bindings.
I don’t think this is linearly correlated. Despite being called a “Language Model”, it does not mean it processes language as humans do. If an LLM is good at supporting you with a programming language mainly depends on the amount of available training data.
Let’s take esoteric languages as an example - there are languages that only work via weird Unicode symbols or other cryptic commands. A human will have a hard time to understand that language, the LLM may not have any problem at all to give working comprehensive examples (as in will be useful).
Time to conquer Malbolge with ChatGPT.
I think that’s the wrong way to look at it.
Let’s frame it this way. English is not the world’s best language. It’s pretty bad, honestly. It makes little logical sense, pronunciation is all over the place, and it’s inconsistent even between native speakers. Yet like 2 billion people speak it, even in places where it’s not the native language, because the UK spent so long as the dominant world power and just saturated all international discourse long enough to make it the most convenient common tongue. And so English becomes the most commonly used language for international discourse in the EU, despite the EU having just one member state (Ireland) where English is the majority, because it’s too inconvenient to switch to anything else.
Programming languages can fall into the same trap. LLMs today can have the majority of their code trained on a small set of popular languages. They’ll be likelier to produce that kind of code reliably, which in turn motivates vibe coders to prioritize those languages over other options that may be more purpose-built or appropriate for the need.
A new programming language that is massively better, more efficient, and easier to use can come about, but an LLM might never excel at it. Basically, a new language precludes itself from success with LLMs. The LLM will suck at it because there is substantially less training data to reliably model from. There will never be enough training data because fewer people are using it. Fewer people are using it because shitty vibe coders just rely on what the LLM can do well. The cycle repeats.
From what I’ve heard, German was still the go-to international language in academia until WW2, when it fell out of favor and US’ post-war boom took over. So it’s a bit more complicated.
Language choice for a solution does not have anything to do with LLM capabilities. For someone’s hobby project, maybe. Engineering departments do not work this way. Just because LLMs can write Java better than some other languages doesn’t mean the next big game engine will be in Java.
If we’re talking about a new language (as in, something that doesn’t have a lot of code available online to train language models), then it will have an impact on engineering departments. If new programmers struggle to learn it, it won’t be used. They might actually go back to Java because it’s easier to work with.