FAWK: LLMs can write a language interpreter

What's the point of making something like this if you don't get to deeply understand what your doing?

What's the point of owning a car if you don't build it by hand yourself?

Anyway, all it will do is stop you being able to run as well as you used to be able to do when you had to go everywhere on foot.

What is the point of car that on Mondays changes colour to blue and on each first Friday of the year explodes?

If neither you not anyone else can fix it, without more cost than making a proper one?

Code review exists.

Proper code review takes as long as writing the damn thing in the first place and is infinitely more boring. And you still miss things that would have been obvious while writing.

In this special case, you'd have to reverse engineer the grammar from the parser, calculate first/follow sets and then see if the grammar even is what you intended it to be.

I have made a lot of things using LLMs and I fully understood everything. It is doable.

Author did review the (also generated) tests, which as long as they're comprehensive enough for his purposes, all pass and coverage is very high, means things work well enough. Attempting to manually edit that code is a whole other thing though.

How deep do you need to know?

"Imagination is more important than knowledge."

At least for me that fits. I have quite enough graduate-level knowledge of physics, math, and computer science to rarely be stumped by a research paper or anything an LLM spits out. That may get me scorn from those tested on those subjects. Yet, I'm still an effective ignoramus.

That argument might work for certain kinds of applications (none I'd like to use, though), but for a programming language, nope.

I am using LLMs to speed up coding as well, but you have to be super vigilant, and do it in a very modular way.

I want something I can use, and something useful. It's not just a learning exercise. I get to understand it by following along.

If they go far enough with it they will be forced to understand it deeply. The LLM provides more leverage at the beginning because this project is a final exam for a first semester undergrad PL course, therefore there are a billion examples of “vaguely Java/Python/C imperative language with objects and functions” to train the LLM on.

Ultimately though, the LLM is going to become less useful as the language grows past its capabilities. If the language author doesn’t have a sufficient map of the language and a solid plan at that point, it will be the blind leading the blind. Which is how most lang dev goes so it should all work out.

Lol thank you for this. It’s more worth I work than i thought!

They literally just made it to do AoC challenges, and shared it for fun (and publicity).

I don't think that contradicts my comment in any way. It's not a programming language then, it is a fun language.