That's an interesting idea. But IMO the real 'token saver' isn't in the language keywords but it's in the naming of things like variables, classes, etc.
replyThere are languages that are already pretty sparse with keywords. e.g in Go you can write 'func main() string', no need to define that it's public, or static etc. So combining a less verbose language with 'codegolfing' the variables might be enough.
I'm not an expert in LLMs, but I don't think character length matters. Text is deterministically tokenized into byte sequences before being fed as context to the LLM, so in theory `mySuperLongVariableName` uses the same number of tokens as `a`. Happy to be corrected here.
replyGo is one of the most verbose mainstream programming languages, so that's a pretty terrible example.
replyTo you maybe, but Go is running a large amount of internet infrastructure today.
replyHow does that relate to Go being a verbose language?
replyIts not verbose to some of us. It is explicit in what it does, meaning I don't have to wonder if there's syntatic sugar hiding intent. Drastically more minimal than equivalent code in other languages.
replyMaybe not a perfect example but it’s more lightweight than Java at least haha
replyIf by lightweight you mean verbosity, then absolutely no.
replyIn go every third line is a noisy if err check.
Well LLMs are made to be extremely verbose so it's a good match!
replyI think there's a huge range here - ChatGPT to me seems extra verbose on the web version, but when running with Codex it seems extra terse.
replyClaude seems more consistently _concise_ to me, both in web and cli versions. But who knows, after 12 months of stuff it could be me who is hallucinating...
I think I remember seeing research right here on HN that terse languages don't actually help all that much
replyI would be very interested in this research... I'm trying to write a language that is simple and concise like Python, but fast and statically typed. My gutfeeling is that more concise than Python (J, K, or some code golfing language) is bad for readability, but so is the verbosity of Rust, Zig, Java.
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