JetBrains working on higher-abstraction programming language

I wish they would focus on providing a better IDE experience and fixing existing bugs (and preventing releasing bugs) and keeping up with supporting their existing tooling.

I have difficultly determining what this company wants to deliver. I know what I actually give them money for.

This sounds to be in the same area as their post on the OCaml forum last year https://discuss.ocaml.org/t/a-next-generation-ide-for-ocaml/... , though it seems they are going for a natural language approach instead of something like AST editing (which is what I had in mind when reading their original outreach message).

They keep calling it a language (Kotlin derivative), but then the CTO refers to it as "basically English", with maybe "some semantics".

Are we just talking about prompting with some enforced structure, or is it a programming language?

Maybe this will be a good way for users to communicate to the LLMs, but I wonder if it would be better for LLMs to generate code in a more disciplined language. Something like Eiffel with pre/post invariants or Lean/Rocq for provable correctness. Then a rigorous compiler can check the LLM emitted what it promised. The verbosity is unpleasant for conventional human programmers, but it's almost a non-issue for the LLM.

I'd love it if jetbrains worked on getting intellij to not hog so much resource and become unresponsive working on huge projects instead.

"So-called "natural language" is wonderful for the purposes it was created for, such as to be rude in, to tell jokes in, to cheat or to make love in (and Theorists of Literary Criticism can even be content-free in it), but it is hopelessly inadequate when we have to deal unambiguously with situations of great intricacy, situations which unavoidably arise in such activities as legislation, arbitration, mathematics or programming." -Dijkstra

While I think the idea of LLM-based tooling and languages co-evolving is interesting, from this limited description, I think this isn't a helpful direction.

> “So instead of writing three applications, you write it in a special programming language, which is basically English, which describes how you want to see this application in a very specified way, and then AI agents, together with JetBrains tooling, will generate the code of all of these platforms,”

Is the process of generating code for each platform from the high-level specification deterministic, predictable, and obeying some natural invariants? Or is it a stochastic and unpredictable? If Alice publishes her open source project with the specification code, and Bob has access to a slightly different set of models at a later date, will Bob be able to reproduce the same generated artifacts that Alice did?

If you _can_ make everything deterministic and well-behaved, does it need to involve AI agents? Or can this effectively turn into an DSL which happens to be English-like, and a code-generation tool?

Work on making Junie a viable competitor to Claude Code instead. While I love its accuracy, its equivalent to CC launching a sub agent per file, takes just as long, and probably burns tokens similarly - except there's no way to disable that approach in Junie.

Is there much meaningful space left between Python (for example) and English (or other written language of your choice)?

LLMs are pretty code at compiling clear descriptive or prescriptive instructions in English down to a programming language.

So we've come a full circle now. From AI Will Replace Programmers to programming the AI to program =)

They’re going to reinvent HyperTalk and AppleScript?

I wrote about why higher level abstractions may not work all the time.

https://simianwords.bearblog.dev/so-you-want-to-create-a-new...

TL;DR the overhead in learning the new abstraction and dealing with the inevitable edge cases (known or unknown) must be taken into account.

All abstractions sound good until you account for these things.

The new language can work if the edge cases of this language are known and minimal.

About 80% of the code in our repos is language or framework baggage, delivers fuck all ROI and the LLM leverage is making about 25% of what is left go away, badly and without any determinism.

Whether or not this is the solution, I don't know, but it feels like the right direction.

>“So instead of writing three applications, you write it in a special programming language, which is basically English, which describes how you want to see this application in a very specified way, and then AI agents [...] will generate the code of all of these platforms"

Inform 7 ?

That is another waterfall fantasy paired with Applescript/UML delusions. Perhaps they are seeking vibe investors or they'll indeed offer a toy IDE for vibe coders alongside with their real product.

Please don’t have it run in a virtual machine. Or at least the JVM. All of Jetbrains products would be 10x better if not written in Java. Native is best.

> the object-oriented architecture

Stopped reading here. Good luck with your shared mutable state! Enjoy!

Ruby?