2. I don't see anything wrong with coding for purely artistic purposes?
3. Presumably a static type checker would be quite helpful for LLMs, since it would help them catch lots of their mistakes.
[0]: https://github.com/teal-language/tl/blob/main/CHANGELOG.md#0...
Now that LLMs are a common thing for coding, modding communities (which in practice have a large number of people using Lua since quite a lot of the most widely modded games use Lua for mods) are having to adapt a bit to handle the influx of a huge number of mods from people who have never programmed before, which I tend to view as a good thing in the long run, but right now LLMs seem to be rather abysmal at writing reasonable Lua. There's a meme (in the original sense of the word) that you can tell when a mod is LLM generated because it will use pcall in ridiculous ways, seemingly because it's a lot quicker to abuse it as a retroactive control flow mechanism than to go back and add proper checks up front (and probably restructure the code in the process). Teal doesn't fully solve the underlying issue of LLMs apparently being very poorly trained on Lua but it does at least give a pretty good way of statically enforcing what the actual types it should be using are.
That's like someone saying "What is the purpose of x64 in the new age of C?" back in 1999.
Surely that’s useful, no matter whether you’re writing the code yourself or having an agent do it.
Though, I am not really in the lua camp either. But I had to comment on the "only AI counts" transfigurative statement.
In fact, I'd say it's more "fun" watching an agent work on something in Lua as the iteration loop is tighter: more restarts, more feedback, instant running. When I deal with typed languages (in my case, Swift) the feedback loop is dragged-out by the compile time which makes the whole process feel slower
Ideally you'd want both. In this case though, if you're paying per token you'd prefer the typed language, since compiler invocations are presumably less expensive. So the interactive compilation strategy where it has to continually consume compiler output and run inference on it is going to be more expensive than letting the compiler do what it's good at. (I wonder at what point that math would invert and what would happen if it did.)
That's why something like Teal is perfect for AI, to answer the original question of "why this when there's AI now?" You'd want to add types to Lua to check what you can beforehand precisely because it helps give you the best of both worlds.
LLMs are already so incredibly capable and will only get better and faster with time.
Learning a new programming language just feels redundant now.
It will be people who understand things and experiment still that will succeed in the world of AI. People who are meat proxies are screwed its already making you lazy and probably giving your brain a disease we haven't named yet, a type 2 diabetes-esque of the brain.