LLM-Complete: The next 700 programming languages

LLM-Complete: The next 700 programming languages Note: An LLM was not used in writing this article. I was reading microgpt1 and found myself brushing up on linear algebra and tensors, and then separately was reading articles du jour about how prompting will replace coding and so on,2 and thought: why might that be? That is, if we are to take all the bold claims of vibecoders at face value. Bear with me. Dijkstra comments, in various places, that language is important. LLMs by definition provide compelling evidence that language is profoundly important (or that we think it is3). Dijkstra argues quite convincingly that the good thing about abstraction is to let us think clearer, say what’s needed unambiguously, and no more than that. Formal languages can’t say a lot by design, but what they do say is absolutely precise. I’ll add my own observation that this is a humble acknowledgement of the human mind’s limitations. There are examples of formal languages (notations, DSLs, etc.) that…