AI coding assistants are closing the door. They need a lot of training data to be good and useful.
Established programming languages have a tremendous amount of that, so AI coding agents will do a good job there. C, PHP, Python, Java, etc.
Garden variety and new programming languages have much less examples in the wild, so AI assistants will do a lesser job with those, unless their lineage leads to one of the established languages.
Finally, the bulk of future developers will be lured to AI assisted coding and therefore won’t generate much training data for new programming languages.
A vicious circle.
All of the above is speculation on my part, obviously.
Maybe AI assistants will get smart enough to master languages they have not been trained on.
I see. Well, I believe AI will really be useful for programming (as opposed to gluing libraries together until it passes the tests) when it will acquire the ability to reason properly enough with new concepts. But then, they will also benefit from better languages, exactly like ourselves.
One day they may even design their own languages or their own cpus.
(and decide that, since we stupidly unearthed and burned in the atmosphere the best reserve of chemical energy that was easily available on this planet, it's just fair to use us as combustible to power the whole thing)
I will go a step further, AI agents transpiling into existing languages is an intermediary step until they improve themselves, just like in the early days of Lisp, Fortran and COBOL, Assembly developers didn't trust them unless they could fully analyse generated Assembly.
Nowadays while generating Assembly is an expected option, it is mostly a niche use case, largely ignored by most developers, many don't even know how to look into Assembly generated by JIT compilers, although that is an available option.
Same will happen with AI tools, they will perform desired actions, and eventually output some kind of data where we can cross-check the quality of generated actions, but not everyone will care to look into them.
You can look at it this way. Or, you can see it as raising the bar for new entrants. If a new programming language has sufficient merits to overcome a poor level of AI assistance, then nothing will stop it, at least in some circles.
But, if mainstream developers have become totally dependent on AI, it is going to be a high bar indeed.
It would be interesting to bake AI into compilers of any new language, so that auto-correction and education of the programmer happens every time they compile.
In general, though, I think people are too quick to surrender to AI.
AI coding assistants are closing the door. They need a lot of training data to be good and useful. Established programming languages have a tremendous amount of that, so AI coding agents will do a good job there. C, PHP, Python, Java, etc.
Garden variety and new programming languages have much less examples in the wild, so AI assistants will do a lesser job with those, unless their lineage leads to one of the established languages.
Finally, the bulk of future developers will be lured to AI assisted coding and therefore won’t generate much training data for new programming languages.
A vicious circle.
All of the above is speculation on my part, obviously. Maybe AI assistants will get smart enough to master languages they have not been trained on.