> External/world effects are visible in function signatures
Brilliant. I think Jai has something like that? Each function declares what it's going to touch (both read/write) globally, and I think you can specify that per block even.
I haven't used Jai (I think it's not out yet) but I remember the author talking about this and it sounded like a great idea.
It's related to the idea of pure functions being easy to reason about. Right now most languages don't even have a concept of pure functions, but the ones that do, just have two categories. When a function is messing with global state you do actually want to know what it's doing.
I think that can be statically computed (and displayed as IDE annotations or whatever) but specifying it explicitly sounds like a good practice either way.
I like that you're including other side effects (e.g. network) there too though, that's pretty cool!
Another thing I'm really interested in is proofs. Not necessarily total proofs (though we seem to be moving in that direction, at least for subsets of the codebase), but just normalizing rudimentary pre and post conditions checks.
I was thinking of setting it up so code can't even compile in release mode if those are missing. (Not every function would need them, but you at least want to state their absence explicitly.)
I was also thinking of setting up strictness levels per function, using hashing or something, so if a function is modified, you'd have to go through a process of double checking it again. And then functions labeled e.g. level 7 strict couldn't call ones with a lower proven strictness level, and so on. I'm told that I've basically been reinventing Ada from first principles so I should probably go and take a look at that...
Wait, your thing is doing hashing too... Woah. (I think that comes from proofs land or something?)
Given how poorly LLMs do with writing prompts for LLMs, I'm not sure I'd trust their judgement in designing a language for LLMs.
> and the runtime requires explicit permission to touch the filesystem, network, etc
This feels like more of an OS problem (or library problem) than a language problem.
> Run one program against many worlds. The same code can run against the real network, a scripted fake, a recording of last week's traffic, or a probability model of how servers usually behave
How is the "world" model different from plain dependency injection?
> How is the "world" model different from plain dependency injection?
In addition to what the other comment said, this "world" model is great for hermetic testing of complex code, LLM written or not. We've seen existing projects that intercept the OS level syscall for testing, replayability, etc. Building it into the language runtime, hopefully with better ergonomics from the start than a syscall, would be a welcome addition broadly.
> Given how poorly LLMs do with writing prompts for LLMs, I'm not sure I'd trust their judgement in designing a language for LLMs.
Yeah agree, what I really want to see now, is a programming language for LLMs, designed by a human (although code could still be LLM-made I suppose), and see how both of them fare in various scenarios.
But basically world is a bit more narrow, that moment where your code touches the outside world (logging, http, etc), you can swap that. It's sorta like DI but deliberately narrower, only the moments where code touches the outside world are swappable.. With DI in theory you can replace anything, which has its benefits, but at least personally I am not a big fan of mocks, except when they touch the outside world. So that's what's replaceable.
I love how people create so many new things with AI, but to think how much tokens, and in turn money we all have collectively burned for these side projects is crazy.
We only come to understand idea quality via evolutionary fitness tests, which means we have to MAKE things in order to find out if they're any good. Everything you make is gonna do hill-climbing in a [potentially unstable] environment in search of an ecological niche. This is true of species a la Darwin, but it's also true of products & ideas.
Anything we make gets to participate in this evolutionary process, even if it sounded dumb at the outset. In fact, doing dumb things is how we get "unstuck" from outdated ways of thinking.
it pales in comparison to all the brain cells burned chasing dumb ideas. Don't sweat it, and keep burning tokens in an effort to discover something great.
Yea, LLM remove the burden of typing - so if token cost don’t explode the new high-level languages will be above the current - and the new low-level language will maybe just weights…
> External/world effects are visible in function signatures
Brilliant. I think Jai has something like that? Each function declares what it's going to touch (both read/write) globally, and I think you can specify that per block even.
I haven't used Jai (I think it's not out yet) but I remember the author talking about this and it sounded like a great idea.
It's related to the idea of pure functions being easy to reason about. Right now most languages don't even have a concept of pure functions, but the ones that do, just have two categories. When a function is messing with global state you do actually want to know what it's doing.
I think that can be statically computed (and displayed as IDE annotations or whatever) but specifying it explicitly sounds like a good practice either way.
I like that you're including other side effects (e.g. network) there too though, that's pretty cool!
Another thing I'm really interested in is proofs. Not necessarily total proofs (though we seem to be moving in that direction, at least for subsets of the codebase), but just normalizing rudimentary pre and post conditions checks.
I was thinking of setting it up so code can't even compile in release mode if those are missing. (Not every function would need them, but you at least want to state their absence explicitly.)
I was also thinking of setting up strictness levels per function, using hashing or something, so if a function is modified, you'd have to go through a process of double checking it again. And then functions labeled e.g. level 7 strict couldn't call ones with a lower proven strictness level, and so on. I'm told that I've basically been reinventing Ada from first principles so I should probably go and take a look at that...
Wait, your thing is doing hashing too... Woah. (I think that comes from proofs land or something?)
AST hashing & effects are both used in Unison, if you want to check that out. I don't know that they have any proof-land stuff, though.
lol I had started a “plugin compiler” that Claude also wanted to name after the Jacquard loom https://github.com/jondwillis/jacq
Fricking training distribution/same-y ness coming for us all… cool project though.
Given how poorly LLMs do with writing prompts for LLMs, I'm not sure I'd trust their judgement in designing a language for LLMs.
> and the runtime requires explicit permission to touch the filesystem, network, etc
This feels like more of an OS problem (or library problem) than a language problem.
> Run one program against many worlds. The same code can run against the real network, a scripted fake, a recording of last week's traffic, or a probability model of how servers usually behave
How is the "world" model different from plain dependency injection?
> How is the "world" model different from plain dependency injection?
In addition to what the other comment said, this "world" model is great for hermetic testing of complex code, LLM written or not. We've seen existing projects that intercept the OS level syscall for testing, replayability, etc. Building it into the language runtime, hopefully with better ergonomics from the start than a syscall, would be a welcome addition broadly.
> Given how poorly LLMs do with writing prompts for LLMs, I'm not sure I'd trust their judgement in designing a language for LLMs.
Yeah agree, what I really want to see now, is a programming language for LLMs, designed by a human (although code could still be LLM-made I suppose), and see how both of them fare in various scenarios.
I've done a version of "world" for Sigil, a programming language I was kinda doing but stopped, also for agents. LLM generated article here https://inerte.github.io/sigil/articles/worlds-not-mocks/
But basically world is a bit more narrow, that moment where your code touches the outside world (logging, http, etc), you can swap that. It's sorta like DI but deliberately narrower, only the moments where code touches the outside world are swappable.. With DI in theory you can replace anything, which has its benefits, but at least personally I am not a big fan of mocks, except when they touch the outside world. So that's what's replaceable.
Very cool -- I often thought that Unisons caching approach should be adopted more widely. Look forward to poking at it later!
I love how people create so many new things with AI, but to think how much tokens, and in turn money we all have collectively burned for these side projects is crazy.
We only come to understand idea quality via evolutionary fitness tests, which means we have to MAKE things in order to find out if they're any good. Everything you make is gonna do hill-climbing in a [potentially unstable] environment in search of an ecological niche. This is true of species a la Darwin, but it's also true of products & ideas.
Anything we make gets to participate in this evolutionary process, even if it sounded dumb at the outset. In fact, doing dumb things is how we get "unstuck" from outdated ways of thinking.
it pales in comparison to all the brain cells burned chasing dumb ideas. Don't sweat it, and keep burning tokens in an effort to discover something great.
As long as token costs are being subsidized, I don't mind that this is the result of the consumer surplus.
"Esperanto for Clankers"
Yea, LLM remove the burden of typing - so if token cost don’t explode the new high-level languages will be above the current - and the new low-level language will maybe just weights…