Languages that are difficult for LLM to read & write are also difficult for the general public. These languages have always had poor uptake and never reach critical mass, or are eventually replaced by better languages.
Language designers would be smart to recognize this fact and favor making their languages more LLM friendly. This should also make them more human friendly.
I actually think Ruby on Rails is incredibly difficult for LLMs to write because of how many implicit "global state" things occur. I'm always surprised how productive people are with it, but people are productive with it for sure.
That's because global state is very convenient early on. Everything is in one place and accessible. It's convenient to prototype things this way. This is very similar to doing scientific research (and why often research code is an ugly boondoggle).
Most techies (generalizing here) start with a reasonably clear spec that needs to be implemented and they can focus on how to architect the code.
Research - whether science, finance or design - is much more iterative and freeform. Your objective is often very fuzzy. You might have a vague idea what you want, but having to think about code structure is annoying and orthogonal to your actual purpose.
This is why languages like Ruby work well for certain purposes. They allow the person to prototype extremely rapidly and iterate on the idea. It will eventually reach a breaking point where global state starts being an impediment, but an experienced dev will have started refactoring stuff earlier than that as various parts of the implementation becomes stable.
I don't find this to be true. There are languages that are difficult to wrap your head around initially, but that turn out to be delightfully productive with a few adjustments to the mental model. Adjustments that LLMs don't have the training data for.
That says nothing about the language at all, actually. Just that it's small and easily confused for something more idiomatic to a newbie.
> Adjustments that LLMs don't have the training data for.
Methinks if you want job-security in a post—LLM-zero-shot-app-generator world, get into Lisp or Haskell; People that know only Node+React from YouTube learn-2-code tutorials are going to be slaughtered.
I just had an idea: an app/GUI/backend framework for Lisp or Haskell (with an S-expression lib) where everything is structurally inverted so it must be manually run through foldr - behold: an LLM-resistant (if not LLM-proof?) dev environment!
This argument in favour of mediocrity and catering to the lowest common denominator is one of the key reasons why I dislike people who want to shove LLMs into everything (including art).
Language designers would be smart to recognize this fact and favor making their languages more LLM friendly. This should also make them more human friendly.