@matt This article reminded me of this quote from Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs: "In teaching our material we use a dialect of the programming language Lisp. We never formally teach the language, because we don’t have to. We just use it, and students pick it up in a few days. This is one great advantage of Lisp-like languages: They have very few ways of forming compound expressions, and almost no syntactic structure. All of the formal properties can be covered in an hour, like the rules of chess. After a short time we forget about syntactic details of the language (because there are none) and get on with the real issues—figuring out what we want to compute, how we will decompose problems into manageable parts, and how we will work on the parts." Maybe the best solution for syntax being too complex and so different between languages is to just use s expressions, not to have AI handle the syntax. The distinctiveness of languages would be preserved by the more important differences. But it seems silly to solve the problem of too many complex syntaxes with AI when you could just simplify syntax. And the same for the other things mentioned: if being knowledgable in multiple frameworks and stacks is that hard, maybe they should be made simpler, or instead of these huge frameworks we should have a bunch of composable libraries instead where that is possible.
Jun 26, 2026, 5:21 PM
