Simon Willison’s Weblog

My hunch is that existing LLMs make it easier to build a new programming language in a way that captures new developers.

Most programming languages are similar enough to existing languages that you only need to know a small number of details to use them: what's the core syntax for variables, loops, conditionals and functions? How does memory management work? What's the concurrency model?

For many languages you can fit all of that, including illustrative examples, in a few thousand tokens of text.

So ship your new programming language with a Claude Skills style document and give your early adopters the ability to write it with LLMs. The LLMs should handle that very well, especially if they get to run an agentic loop against a compiler or even a linter that you provide.

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