> With AI, we have converged on a set of languages. For the web, it's JavaScript or TypeScript. For backend, it's Go and Rust.<p>what a disaster we have ahead of us not because AI but because this kind of thinking
My case for why Elixir is especially suited for use with AI: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49835781">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49835781</a> (summary: it's mostly about the BEAM, which is more of a k8s killer than a rust killer).<p>I don't think this really applies to any of the benefits I've described there:<p>> AI can replicate a lot of its features in Rust for one-tenth of the cost and 10 times the speed
The force of convergence should almost make us care <i>more</i> about other languages, since the explosion of software is a multiplier on good/bad designs, and we should consider what we want our AIs to be using.
Aye--even if you've reached the point of thinking that the only role of a human is to feed good ideas into the machine, language is a thing that shapes thought--Lisp as a family is a thing different enough from a lang wanting to be a better C/C++ or a better Java that getting your brain thinking in terms of it can help you produce a different set of ideas (some of which may even be good ones). For me personally, it's really opened my mind to functional programming and intelligent use of recursion, in a way that I probably wouldn't have ever had cause to consider if I only ever concerned myself with the minimally convergent set of standard business langs, in the way that all our legacy code had been using them.<p>Of course, Lisps also seem to have the property of attracting people who genuinely like the practice of programming and, if it clicks with you, it has the property of generally leaving you really excited to write more of it. If you're hauling up and spending real American dollars to spend a weekend packed in a hall full of nerds to chat about a niche programming language, you're probably in that group. Consequent to that, it'd be a mighty small-minded thing to wonder what the point of joy is, when you could just be managing an agent swarm to write more enterprise Go code.
Industry takeoff would certainly be a nice-to-have. But the racket community is largely computer scientists, who program for research. Will computer scientists turn to Rust to write papers because it's fast ? I don't think so, because their needs seems to be a language that's easy to pick up and experiment with, and writepapers with. People will argue over sexp syntax, but that's why Rhombus exists.
> Pretty much nothing else can get picked by AI if you start a new project.<p>You can pick literally almost anything, and current models will be able to write it. I don't know how you arrived at that statement.
Hygenic macros and the DSL they enable are fantastic ways to prototype things that then inspired stuff like LINQ.
There are enough AI stories on Hacker News. We don't need AI advocates coming to the stories that <i>aren't about AI</i> and saying they don't matter because they're not AI.<p>Things that aren't AI still matter and are still interesting.
Oh thats such a killjoy attitude. There is more to programming then "production", "shipping" and the overall corporate lala. You said it yourself, you get a lot of joy from designing your own programming language. And you know, even BEFORE AI it would have been unrealistic to see your langauge actually take off big time. So you answered your own question. Racket is likely not interesting to one of the big coprs. But you know, frankly, who cares? Some people use AI and have it write only 4 languages? Sure. Go ahead, and you know? Who cares? Let them have their monoculture. Such a sad sad sad comment.