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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   26646 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 15, 2025

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I'm a SWE that's never worked with Rust (I've mostly been in R/Python, then SQL/Java/C#). I feel like with the advent of LLMs, the choice of programming languages will be so much less important in the near future. Before LLMs, having to learn a new language imposed a lot of costs in how to do the basic stuff, as having 10+ years of experience in a language means you can bust out features much more quickly than someone who has to constantly go to StackOverflow to figure out how to do boilerplate stuff. I feel like a lot of the debates over languages was really just "please don't make me learn this new crap", with people having their preferred language and then actively searching for reasons to defend it. Now you can just have Claude Code easily do boilerplate in any language for you, and focus on testing things instead. I'm converting old SQR code into SQL now, and pre-LLM this would have required me to have at least a basic knowledge of SQR, but that's no longer really the case.

At least today, LLMs can't produce anything which runs in any of the languages I use at work or leisure. An AI should be able to reason from a spec etc. but they're currently slaves to training data alone.

You must be working with very strange/niche languages then. I've had no trouble getting them to understand SQR and a couple other extremely old languages like FAME.

If you've got text-format spec to give them, you can kinda get them to handle esolangs to solve problems that don't exist in the normal corpus for those languages. But I haven't seen one great at it yet.

I'm converting old SQR code into SQL now, and pre-LLM this would have required me to have at least a basic knowledge of SQR, but that's no longer really the case.

Using it in that direction is fine becauae you can check the output, I'm not sure it's going to work so well in a "I'm used to language X and they're making me write in language Y" scenario.

I would have agreed with you last year, but it's getting easier and easier to ignore learning the language you're working with too. It's obviously still useful to have at least a basic understanding, but I feel we're like <10 years from just trusting LLM code output as much as we trust compiler output. Nobody reads compiler stuff any more.

Nobody reads compiler stuff any more.

Clearly you've never worked in a field that cares about performance. People absolutely do read compiler output to see if it did anything too stupid and work around such issues.

We even have fancy new tools for this like Compiler Explorer, which is great for answering "does clang vectorize this like I want it to?".

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