Hacker NewsLet's run a thought experiment. If we were to design a new programming language today with the primary goal of it being written by an AI (like Copilot) and reviewed by a human, what would its core features be?
My initial thoughts are that we would trade many of the conveniences we currently value for absolute, unambiguous clarity. For example:
- Would we get rid of most syntactic sugar? If there's only one, explicit way to write a `for` loop, the AI's output becomes more predictable and easier to review.
- Would we enforce extreme explicitness? Imagine a language where you must write `fn foo(none)` if there are no parameters, just to remove the ambiguity of `()`.
- How would we handle safety? Would features like mandatory visibility (`pub`/`priv`) and explicit ownership annotations for FFI calls become central to the language itself, providing guarantees the reviewer can see instantly?
- Would such a language even be usable by humans for day-to-day work, or would it purely be a compilation target for AI prompts?
What trade-offs would you be willing to make for a language that gave you higher confidence in the code an AI generates?
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