"Last year I first started thinking about what the future of programming languages might look like now that agentic engineering is a growing thing. Initially I felt that the enormous corpus of pre-existing code would cement existing languages in place but now I'm starting to think the opposite is true. Here I want to outline my thinking on why we are going to see more new programming languages and why there is quite a bit of space for interesting innovation."
"Does an agent perform dramatically better on a language that it has in its weights? Obviously yes. But there are less obvious factors that affect how good an agent is at programming in a language: how good the tooling around it is and how much churn there is. Zig seems underrepresented in the weights (at least in the models I've used) and also changing quickly."
"On the other hand, some languages are well represented in the weights but agents still don't succeed as much because of tooling choices. Swift is a good example: in my experience the tooling around building a Mac or iOS application can be so painful that agents struggle to navigate it. Also not great."
Agentic engineering is shifting the success factors for programming languages toward model exposure, tooling quality, and release stability. Large existing code corpora help models but do not guarantee agent effectiveness. Poor or complex tooling can prevent agents from succeeding even when models have seen a language. Rapidly changing or underrepresented languages can still be usable when clear documentation and targeted tooling exist. As the cost of coding falls, reliance on broad ecosystems decreases and pragmatic language choice increases. New languages can gain traction by optimizing for agent-friendly tooling, stable releases, and accessible documentation.
Read at Armin Ronacher's Thoughts and Writings
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