FAWK: LLMs can write a language interpreter

Curious why you do this with AI instead of just writing it yourself?

You should be able to whip up a Lexer, Parser and compiler with a couple weeks of time.

I'm not the previous user, but I imagine that weeks of investment might be a commitment one does not have.

I have implemented an interpreter for a very basic stack-based language (you can imagine it being one of the simplest interpreters you can have) and it took me a lot of time and effort to have something solid and functional.

Thus I can absolutely relate to the idea of having an LLM who's seen many interpreters lay out the ground for you and make you play as quickly as possible with your ideas while procrastinating delving in details till necessary.

Because he did it in a day, not a few weeks.

If I want to go from Bristol to Swindon, I could walk there in about 12 hours. It's totally possible to do it by foot. Or I could use a car and be there in an hour. There and back, with a full work day in-between done, in a day. Using the tool doesn't change what you can do, it speeds up getting the end result.

There is no end result. It's a toy language based on a couple of examples without a grammar where apparently the LLM used its standard (plagiarized) parser/lexer code and reiterated until the examples passed.

Automating one of the fun parts of CS is just weird.

So with this awesome "productivity" we now can have 10,000 new toy languages per day on GitHub instead of just 100?

That was exactly my thought. Why automate the coding part to create something that will be used for coding (and in itself can be automated , going buy the same logic)? This makes zero sense.

If you could also automate away the reason for being in Swindon in the first place, would you still go?

It would be very new to me. I'd have to learn a lot to do that. And I can't spare the time or attention. It's more of a fun side project.

The machine code would also be tedious, tho fun. But I really can't spare the time for it.

The only reason for going to Swindon was to walk there?

If so then of course you still should go.

But the point making of a computer program usually isn't for "the walk".

Because this is someone in a "spiral" or "AI psychosis" Its pretty clear by how they are talking.

Thank you for bringing this matter to our attention, TeodorDyakov and bgwalter. I am a member of the fun police, and I have placed keepamovin, and accomplice, My_Name under arrest, pending trial, for having fun wrong. If convicted, thet each face a 5 year sentence to a joyless marriage for healthcare without possiblity of time off for boring behavior. We take these matters pretty seriously, as crimes of this nature could lead to a bubble collapse, and the economy can't take that (or a joke), so good work there!

Yes, and the result is undoubtably trash. I have yet to see a single vibe-coded app or reasonably large/complex snippet which isn't either 1) almost an exact reproduction of a popular library, tutorial, etc. or 2) complete and utter trash.

So my question was, given that this is not a very hard thing to build properly, why not properly.

If you can automated away the reason for being at the destination, then there's no point in automating the way to get to the destination.

similar for automating creating an interpreter with nicer programming language features in order to build an app more easily when you can just automate creation of the app in the first place.

The choice with this kind of question is almost never between "do it properly or do it faster with LLMs".

It's between "do it with LLMs or don't do it at all" - because most people don't have the time to take on an ambitious project like implementing a new programming language just for fun.

"Because it's a shiny toy that I want to play with" is a perfectly valid reason that still applies here. The invalid assumption in your premise is that people either enjoy coding or don't. The truth is that they enjoy coding some things but not others, and those preferences are very subjective.