@marcoarment I actually have a friend who has spent the last month writing a new language that more deeply embeds the ideas of MCP into its core. It's fascinating to see him take what he's learned and bring it to a domain-- I think we may actually see lots of micro-languages that are purpose built.

@marcoarment Feels like in some ways, prompt engineering (or whatever it morphs into) is the new programming language.

@marcoarment To be able to think about that, we need to define a programming language.

From my prospective, I think there will be many more structured ways of specifying algorithms. Maybe tailored to usage with LLMs.

@marcoarment last major language for humans?

@marcoarment Yes. The next programming language will be LLM-friendly, possibly even created by an LLM.

@marcoarment why would people stop making those?

@marcoarment The best analogy I have is that our current abstraction programming languages are likely to become the next “assembly language”. Something that you can drop to if things are really hairy, but you are likely working at a higher-level abstraction nearly all the time.

@marcoarment if we think about it - programming languages have largely been about enabling yet another layer of abstraction and becoming more human friendly. From flipping switches, to assembly/machine language to C to Java, Perl, etc … (except Perl, that was an abomination). Natural language to an LLM that will use whatever language is appropriate seems like the natural next step.

@marcoarment The idea that everyone turning to LLMs to generate their code means the code it generates doesn't matter is silly. Will there be wide swaths of slop where it doesn't matter? Sure, but for the places where quality matters (life safety, mission critical, in theory places like Apple) there will still be a need to review, tweak, and smooth the source code that an engineer first generates with an LLM tool

@marcoarment I suspect we’ll have a new round of languages that are designed to be used by LLMs more efficiently, but still readable/understandable by humans.

@marcoarment i'm thinking: probably not. all of our existing languages have been for human understanding.

vibe coding still writes languages we've been using for years. what if we throw away the part where you get to audit it for the sake of a more efficient language?

that sounds crazy and reckless and totally on point witb 2026

@nebhale @marcoarment I'm curious how this LLM will be trained to use an LLM-friendly language.

@marcoarment Probably. And I actually think it has very little to do with LLMs. I feel like we’ve reached peak programming language.

@marcoarment all these real engineers with free time?

You know they're making languages.

@emc @marcoarment actually I think this is even less likely. One reason LLMs are *so* good at writing code is because there is an insane amount of material for them to train on

What about current languages is inefficient for LLMs? What aspects of LLMs would you take advantage of with a new language?

How would you train all the edge cases and best practices if there's not a huge number of humans out there generating the content LLMs have trained on so far?

@marcoarment Haskell proves that people will make programming languages that no one wants or needs, so I say no.

@marcoarment
Definitely no, but "You've made your last major programming language, {Villain_Name}!" makes for a great line.

@marcoarment Hell no. There’s usually a new version of Swift to learn every year.

@marcoarment I seriously doubt it. I’m not sure we’ll ever see another C++, but another Python? Absolutely.