This was one of my bigger worries for LLM coding: we might develop path dependence on the largest tools and languages.

I hope this isn't the future of "new" languages. Hopefully newer AI tools can actually learn a language and they won't be the limiting factor.

If you just see language as a tool, unless you’re self employed or working in open source, wouldn’t the lack of job market demand for it be the first blocker?

Gleam isn’t a very unique language. The loss from generalizing may be less than the improved ergonomics, if not now then as LLMs improve.

Yes, because LLMs don't change the fact that different programming languages have different expressive capabilities. It's easier to say some things in some languages over others. That doesn't change if it's an LLM writing the code; LLMs have finite context windows and limited attention. If you can express an algorithm in 3000 loc in one language but 30 loc in another, the more expressive language is still preferred, even if the LLM can spit out the 3000 lines in 1s. The reason being if the resulting codebase is 10 - 100x larger than it needs to be, that has real costs that are not mitigated by LLMs or agents. All things being equal, you'd still prefer the right tool for the job, which does not imply we should use Python for everything because it dominates the training set, it means we should make sure LLMs have capabilities to write other programming languages equally well before we rely on them too much.

I feel that was more true 1-2 years ago. These days I find Claude Code write almost as good (or as bad depending on your perspective) Elixir code as JavaScript code and there must be less Elixir code in the training data.

where do you think the corpus of training data comes from?

Its pretty much the same thing as in every previous age, where not having a community of experience and the supporting materials they produce has been a disadvantage to early adopters of a new language, so the people that used it first were people with a particular need that it seemed to address that offset that for them, or that had a particular interest in being in the vanguard.

And those people are the people that develop the body of material that later people (and now LLMs) learn from.

Seems like you are not target audience for these new languages and that is OK. But I guess there are still many people that want to try new things (on their own even).

In the medium to long term, if LLMs are unable to easily learn new languages and remap the knowledge they gained from training on different languages, then they will have failed in their mission of becoming a general intelligence.

Perhaps this is a silly question but how do you do functional with no generics? Arent they pretty much required for map/reduce/filter?

I saw your other comment that you meant interface. But an example of a language that went without a feature people thought the language desperately needed was Go with generics. They only added them more than ten years later, when they figured out the best way to implement them.

It might be the same with gleam, with first version in 2019 and 1.0 in 2024. The language authors might think they are either uneeded and lead to anti patterns, or are waiting to see the best way to implement them.

As a mostly back end dev Elm looked really nice but all the conflict with the creator and then the lack of compiler releases made me shy away a bit.

I have bumped into "the Elm architecture" in other projects though and it was nice.