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Comment by DylanSp | Hacker News Reader

The AI/LLM boom has really hurt my interest in developing new programming languages. I worry that even if I come up with a new language that's a significant step forward, the lack of an existing corpus for it would limit the ability of tools like Copilot to work with it, which would discourage adoption.

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It's funny I was just thinking about this. While this is true, the huge silver lining is that using much smarter LLMs, we'll be able to port existing libraries from other languages to your new one in an idiomatic way thus helping adoption!

Doing it in an idiomatic way might be difficult if there's not much of an existing corpus, though. (Or if the language is new enough that it hasn't developed a lot of idioms)

Large context models offer some hope for this. Gemini had a demo where the model was able to accurately translate a (human) language it didn’t know by putting an entire dictionary and grammar guide into the prompt. So maybe in the future you’ll be able to link Copilot to your new language’s documentation and it will just work.

Where is this demo? I googled and can’t find anything.

It wasn't a demo. It was a report in the model card

https://imgur.com/a/qXcVNOM https://arxiv.org/pdf/2403.05530

AI could also be used as a tool to help you develop the language - you could try to teach your language to a LLM, or finetune one to help generate the language, or simply plug in a grammar to the ones that can restrict by grammar and have a ready-made generator.

I can see how that might help write sample programs, which could be useful for testing my implementation, but how else would it contribute to developing the language?

I've used AI to test documentation, that is I give the AI some documentation I wrote as context and ask it to do something. If the AI gets it wrong, it can be an indication the docs aren't clear. I've thought about this since I also have a toy language I play around with, and I intend to use AI for this as well - feed it my docs and see if they're clear enough for the LLM to produce correct code.

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