JetBrains working on higher-abstraction programming language

https://www.infoworld.com/article/4029053/jetbrains-working-on-higher-abstraction-programming-language.html

by pjmlp • 11 months ago

63 70 11 months ago

infoworld.com

trinix912• 11 months ago

So we've come a full circle now. From AI Will Replace Programmers to programming the AI to program =)

ourmandave• 11 months ago

And back round again when Scotty is talking into a mouse.

xscott2• 11 months ago

Maybe this will be a good way for users to communicate to the LLMs, but I wonder if it would be better for LLMs to generate code in a more disciplined language. Something like Eiffel with pre/post invariants or Lean/Rocq for provable correctness. Then a rigorous compiler can check the LLM emitted what it promised. The verbosity is unpleasant for conventional human programmers, but it's almost a non-issue for the LLM.

dkersten• 11 months ago

I agree. I feel like the more strictly defined the problem space can be and the more guarded rails that can be added and checked, the better the LLM will be. The data derived from such constructs also doubles as providing additional context to the LLM.

I haven’t had much time to really experiment with it but I feel that the typescript xstate library would in theory be a great fit for LLMs as it allows them to break a problem into states and state transitions and then focus on on one state at a time.

singularity2001• 11 months ago

did anyone manage to cross the chasm between floats and reals doing proofs about algorithms in actual code? It might be a skill issue but I'm always stuck at reals not being decidably comparable

xscott2• 11 months ago

That's a good question, and I certainly don't know the answer. Floats are a bit messy, but I would guess it's solvable.

BenGosub• 11 months ago

LLMs can only predict the next word, I don't know if it's an advantage to use a language with provable correctness or dependent types, especially when training data is scarce.

Dilettante_• 11 months ago

“So instead of writing three applications, you write it in a special programming language, which is basically English, which describes how you want to see this application in a very specified way, and then AI agents [...] will generate the code of all of these platforms"

psunavy03• 11 months ago

They said this was going to happen over 60 years ago, and the end result was COBOL.

kmoser• 11 months ago

So, vibe coding

abeppu• 11 months ago

While I think the idea of LLM-based tooling and languages co-evolving is interesting, from this limited description, I think this isn't a helpful direction.

“So instead of writing three applications, you write it in a special programming language, which is basically English, which describes how you want to see this application in a very specified way, and then AI agents, together with JetBrains tooling, will generate the code of all of these platforms,”

Is the process of generating code for each platform from the high-level specification deterministic, predictable, and obeying some natural invariants? Or is it a stochastic and unpredictable? If Alice publishes her open source project with the specification code, and Bob has access to a slightly different set of models at a later date, will Bob be able to reproduce the same generated artifacts that Alice did?

If you _can_ make everything deterministic and well-behaved, does it need to involve AI agents? Or can this effectively turn into an DSL which happens to be English-like, and a code-generation tool?

ksec• 11 months ago

Ruby?

xnx• 11 months ago

Is there much meaningful space left between Python (for example) and English (or other written language of your choice)?

LLMs are pretty code at compiling clear descriptive or prescriptive instructions in English down to a programming language.

adelrune• 11 months ago

Inform 7 ?

7e• 11 months ago

Please don’t have it run in a virtual machine. Or at least the JVM. All of Jetbrains products would be 10x better if not written in Java. Native is best.

paddim8• 11 months ago

Native AOT compiled code is not necessarily faster than JIT compiled code. The Java JIT engine can do a lot of optimisations that would not be possible with AOT compilation. In the end it's compiled down to machine code anyway.

pjmlp7• 11 months ago

Still waiting for them to prove how Kotlin Native is so much better than Java.

jdmoreira4• 11 months ago

the object-oriented architecture

Stopped reading here. Good luck with your shared mutable state! Enjoy!

whalesalad• 11 months ago

You can leverage objects in an immutable and shared-nothing type of way. These ideas are not mutually exclusive. https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/screencasts/catalog/funct...

jdmoreira4• 11 months ago

Yes you can and I do often. Would I build my new high-level lang around OOP? Nop

pjmlp7• 11 months ago

Seems to work alright for all major GUI platforms in use in the market.

jdmoreira4• 11 months ago

Not true for react, swiftui, jetback compose, etc.

Everything else was built in the 90s or early 00s which was peak OOP

kylecazar• 11 months ago

They keep calling it a language (Kotlin derivative), but then the CTO refers to it as "basically English", with maybe "some semantics".

Are we just talking about prompting with some enforced structure, or is it a programming language?

konart• 11 months ago

I remember working on a project (something like a java IDE) with jruby inside and a natural-langauge-like DSL for an end user.

w4• 11 months ago

Isn't this more or less what every procedural programming language is? It's especially obvious with examples like Apple's Objective-C APIs ([object doSomethingAndReturnATypeWith:anotherObject]), Cobol (a IS GREATER THAN b), or SQL (SELECT field FROM table WHERE condition), but even assembly is a mnemonic English-ish abstraction for binary.

I'm intrigued by the idea, but my major concern would be that moving up to a new level of abstraction would even further obscure the program's logic and would make debugging especially difficult. There's no avoiding the fact that the code will need to be translated to procedural logic for the CPU to execute at some point. But that is not necessarily fatal to the project, and I am sure that assembly programmers felt the same way about Fortran and C, and Fortran and C programmers felt the same way about Java and Python, and so on.

crinkly• 11 months ago

About 80% of the code in our repos is language or framework baggage, delivers fuck all ROI and the LLM leverage is making about 25% of what is left go away, badly and without any determinism.

Whether or not this is the solution, I don't know, but it feels like the right direction.

linkage• 11 months ago

They’re going to reinvent HyperTalk and AppleScript?

tracker1• 11 months ago

I was thinking about Delphi myself.

dardeaup• 11 months ago

Yeah, I think that JetBrains might be able to do some really cool stuff with Object Pascal. I don't know if they have the chops to take on cross-platform UI like what Lazarus did with LCL, but it would be awesome.

declan_roberts• 11 months ago

I'd love it if jetbrains worked on getting intellij to not hog so much resource and become unresponsive working on huge projects instead.

prerok• 11 months ago

They should use the LLM to do the refactoring for them.

Only half joking, though. Dogfooding is big at the place I work at and they should do it too.

burnt-resistor2• 11 months ago

Maybe they need to gradually refactor/replace components in something other than a JVM language. And not Electron (JS) either. ;o)

9dev• 11 months ago

It’s a huge org. Pretty sure they can chew gum and walk down the sidewalk at the same time.

jzackpete• 11 months ago

having been a customer for more than a decade, I've noticed an inverse correlation between their org size and the quality of their products

terminalbraid• 11 months ago

I wish they would focus on providing a better IDE experience and fixing existing bugs (and preventing releasing bugs) and keeping up with supporting their existing tooling.

I have difficultly determining what this company wants to deliver. I know what I actually give them money for.

mhitza2• 11 months ago

This sentiment really resonates with me.

There are a bit too many lingering bugs in their product offerings, and they are branching out instead of cutting back and improving what's already there. VSCode is eating their lunch, and they seem to have focused to compete with the things VSCode does, for a while, and now on the AI race (like all companies).

yodon• 11 months ago

The rate of Rider crashes on OSX skyrocketed recently, around the beginning of this year. Super disappointing and frustrating.

geodel• 11 months ago

But aren't you excited that with new higher level language you can have higher level disappointments and frustrations.

john01dav• 11 months ago

I have noticed that the quality went down hill a few updates after they introduced llm features. My guess is that they're dogfooding their llm features and suffering consequences where llms don't think about code as well as good programmers.

rglover• 11 months ago

Exactly. I was testing out betas of their newer IDE (Fleet) about ~2 years ago and was really impressed. The AI stuff is really distracting people.

tnolet• 11 months ago

Webstorm still randomly freezes when my Macbook goes to sleep. This is only happening the last 1 year or so.

octagons• 11 months ago

I share this sentiment - I often get the sense that they struggle to prioritize their development efforts appropriately.

It baffles me that they don’t offer a way of creating my own JetBrains IDE from the pile of features available across their IDEs and other tools. I pay for the “all products pack” and have started to question whether it’s worth it. Even if I am working in an IDE like PyCharm, it’s not much work to also work with a pre-compiled language in the same project. The distinction between the different IDEs grows less so year over year.

wilsonnb3• 11 months ago

They have plugins for IntelliJ for almost all of the languages they have an IDE for, so you can do what you are asking for if I am understanding you correctly.

The only exception off the top of my head is .NET support, which isn’t available as an extension.

simianwords• 11 months ago

I wrote about why higher level abstractions may not work all the time.

https://simianwords.bearblog.dev/so-you-want-to-create-a-new...

TL;DR the overhead in learning the new abstraction and dealing with the inevitable edge cases (known or unknown) must be taken into account.

All abstractions sound good until you account for these things.

The new language can work if the edge cases of this language are known and minimal.

bgwalter• 11 months ago

That is another waterfall fantasy paired with Applescript/UML delusions. Perhaps they are seeking vibe investors or they'll indeed offer a toy IDE for vibe coders alongside with their real product.

taylorallred• 11 months ago

"So-called "natural language" is wonderful for the purposes it was created for, such as to be rude in, to tell jokes in, to cheat or to make love in (and Theorists of Literary Criticism can even be content-free in it), but it is hopelessly inadequate when we have to deal unambiguously with situations of great intricacy, situations which unavoidably arise in such activities as legislation, arbitration, mathematics or programming." -Dijkstra

mhitza2• 11 months ago

This sounds to be in the same area as their post on the OCaml forum last year https://discuss.ocaml.org/t/a-next-generation-ide-for-ocaml/... , though it seems they are going for a natural language approach instead of something like AST editing (which is what I had in mind when reading their original outreach message).

smrtinsert• 11 months ago

Work on making Junie a viable competitor to Claude Code instead. While I love its accuracy, its equivalent to CC launching a sub agent per file, takes just as long, and probably burns tokens similarly - except there's no way to disable that approach in Junie.

moomin• 11 months ago

"A high-level language that's basically English."

COBOL, you're inventing COBOL.

samoit• 11 months ago

Maybe SmallTalk?

burnt-resistor2• 11 months ago

(or Smalltalk or AppleScript or the pantomime "language" of Cucumber)

PHB ignores observation by Dilbert and approves $40M expenditure to reinvent the wheel anyhow.

pjmlp7• 11 months ago

I find so ironic that for all the complaints COBOL has had troughout its history, now advocates for all programming languages spend all day typing whole books on a tiny chat window.

codingwagie• 11 months ago

JetBrains product quality has really gone downhill.

chuckadams• 11 months ago

I'd always assumed that was what MPS was about, but I guess that's about developing more precise DSLs than having one single language to rule them all. But I'm sure that approach will work this time by just throwing AI and gigawatts worth of handwaving at it :-|

sakesun• 11 months ago

When I was young, I was fascinated by the paper "Language-Oriented Programming: The Next Programming Paradigm"[1] and was eager to see how the future would unfold. Decades later, I finally decided that perhaps just using Python—and making a good living—is fine by me.

[1] https://resources.jetbrains.com/storage/products/mps/docs/La...

andrekandre• 11 months ago

  > So instead of writing three applications, you write it in a special programming language, which is basically English, which describes how you want to see this application in a very specified way, and then AI agents, together with JetBrains tooling, will generate the code of all of these platforms

i take it to mean no more kotlin multiplatform if ai will just generate platform specific code....?

ameliaquining2• 11 months ago

My guess is that useful maintenance principles for human-authored code, such as avoiding reimplementing the same logic multiple times, will remain useful for LLMs if and when they take a greater role in maintenance. In which case Kotlin Multiplatform wouldn't be going anywhere.

ameliaquining2• 11 months ago

I admit that I'm kind of intrigued. On the one hand, this is a standard vaporware concept that people have promised time and again almost since the dawn of programming. On the other hand, LLMs that write and maintain code currently have to do it using tools designed for humans, and that's probably leaving some amount of value on the table.

Right now I think I'd bet that whatever this is won't ultimately impress me much, but not at very extreme odds.

lenkite• 11 months ago

Didn't realize English was a derivative of Kotlin. Wow, I achieved enlightenment!

diimdeep• 11 months ago

This is probably just marketing gimmick with unique angle and born from aspirations to sell you subscription based SAAS/PAAS/coding_agent that is supposedly not like every other agent out there.

Also, I do not believe in magic carpets.

Also, I do not want even more higher-abstraction level that will come with even more layers of bloat.

thefourthchime• 11 months ago

Something I've been thinking about is language models aren't good at large software, but they're good at little demos. If you could build software by making little boxes, sort of like ActiveX controls back in the day, or microservices, and the model just focused on its own little microservice or object, and then you can build the software by connecting all of these.

jdlshore• 11 months ago

The problem with this sort of approach is that the complexity moves to the interaction between microservices.

And in fact, software is made out of little interacting boxes already. They’re called “functions” and “classes.”

giovannibonetti• 11 months ago

Roc [1] is the language I think does the best trade-off among high-level instructions, design simplicity, performance, and pragmatism to handle real-world tasks.

It started as a purely functional language, but the authors are adding some escape hatches, such as imperative for loops, for cases where the functional approach is too complex (e.g., implementing quicksort). And it is pragmatic like Go when it comes to simplicity, compiling fast, and running fast.

AI programming and a compiler that catches bugs through good language design make a great match.

[1] https://www.roc-lang.org/

oumua_don17• 11 months ago

> So basically, you write the design doc in English, maybe with some semantics, with some abstract paragraph, some other things which might help

Isn’t that literate programming or in similar vein?

JetBrains working on higher-abstraction programming language

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