Dario has always wanted the AI development to slow down and be more careful. Safer AI development was a core reason that Anthropic split off from OpenAI.
What's different today is that now all the big LLM firms want to slow down AI development. When men like Musk and Altman (both known for habitually shooting their mouths off and saying whatever they need to whoever needs to hear it regardless of truth) suddenly agree with Amodei, that's when things start to smell off.
> What's different today is that now all the big LLM firms
not all, just a few American ones (~PayPal Mafia + Google), there are other big American LLM developers (notables include Nvidia, Meta, and Palantir) that do not agree
That's surprising because WVO just updated the readme to actually be a decent pitch for the language (although it's LLM-text heavy) just before it was posted to here.
Why? It's idiomatic to math. There's a lot to hate about math notation (use more than one letter in your variable names!) but "let" for declaring variables seems harmless.
If I'm going to pick a bone about modern programming language conventions it's the prevalence of = for assignment and == for equality that grinds my gears.
Yeah, it seems like the sweet-spot for this is real-time and embedded because it should be extremely conservative and consistently fast about memory allocation and de-allocation.
Sad that it's got plug-in stuff as a "non-goal", because I'd love to see this as a scripting engine for gaming (since that's Wouter van Oortmerssen's background). But I imagine a "compiles to C" language would at the very least be functionally impossible to sandbox.
Edit: Question for anybody who's playing with this: When he talks about no generics he says that ADTs still work... is that like his example of writing a function "double" that returns "a + a" and works for any type that supports the plus operator?
It sounds like compile-time duck-typing but I'm having trouble working out the boundaries of that in my head. It sounds like it would only work with fully-open-source libraries for one thing since everything would have to compile from source. Anybody have experience with that sort of thing?
I'm a big fan of Aardappel, I used to co-run the Cube/Sauerbraten mapping website. I've never played with his language projects since they generally seemed too C-fixated to me... but despite that being the case here, I can at least see the value proposition clearly-enough that it seems really cool.
I think the README has been updated to be much more informative since it was first posted. tl;dr:
Stack-obsessed compiles-to-C programming language that promises to be faster than idiomatic C++ or Rust by using creative ideas about allocating dynamically-sized objects to the stack.
I feel this in my bones. I've literally had to fix outages in products where the failure was a "document store" or a "notification system" haphazardly slapped on by a student under direct supervision of a PM with no experienced technical leadership.
One time it was user profile avatars that took a site down. I work in line of business software, nobody needs avatars.
My experience is always "we have a standard SQL server datamart. We just need to put a good reporting tool on that. You're a business analyst and product manager, go analyze some products."
"But can't you just make something exactly like we imagine? We're already paying you and buying stuff is paperwork".
Also it would be nice to have a good standard vector format that isn't the complete kitchen-sink that is SVG, but we don't have that. We needed "jpeg but for vector graphics" and instead we got "html but for vector graphics".
So anybody saying "we should use more vectors" has to remember what the state of open vector graphics standards is.
The form of JPEG-XL that can lossless convert to/from traditional JPEG is exciting tech that should be adopted universally. The non-backwards-compatible version of it seems redundant with AVIF.
What's different today is that now all the big LLM firms want to slow down AI development. When men like Musk and Altman (both known for habitually shooting their mouths off and saying whatever they need to whoever needs to hear it regardless of truth) suddenly agree with Amodei, that's when things start to smell off.
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