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Small-Scale Question Sunday for February 15, 2026

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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The latest generation of languages had to provide a dependency manager, a build system, a language server protocol and comprehensive documentation just to get people to look at them.

I'm afraid the next generation will have to provide trained LLMs that can write it as well, which means only the biggest AI players will be able to innovate. No more BDFLs or university professors coming up with brilliant ideas and implementing them in a new programming language.

No reason people couldn't just ingest language documentation into the context, or even fine tune an existing base model for their language.

It's still an uphill struggle against literal gigabytes of source code in Python, Java, JS and so on that LLMs have been trained on.

This is a fully general argument against any new APIs of any kind - after all, existing APIs are already in the training set.

Nevertheless, LLMs can learn to use APIs they haven't seen in pretraining.