[HN Gopher] Show HN: I made a "programming language" looking for...
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Show HN: I made a "programming language" looking for feedback
Author : alonsovm
Score : 21 points
Date : 2026-03-29 18:35 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| zahlman wrote:
| So instead of auto-completing bits of LLM-generated code into the
| codebase, you preprocess it in. I can imagine a lot of devs won't
| like the ergonomics of that, but I like the idea that you can
| keep both original .glp and generated source files in version
| control.
|
| I'd strongly recommend going over the README by hand. What you
| currently have is redundant and disorganized, and header
| sizes/depths don't make a lot of sense. The "manual build"
| instructions should also describe the dependencies that the
| install script is setting up.
| bojanstef4 wrote:
| did you know "glup" (pronounced gloop) in serbian means "stupid"
| burgerone wrote:
| Glup is indeed not the name of the project.
| mpalmer wrote:
| The language feels like a solution in search of a problem, and
| the mostly-generated README reduces my confidence in the quality
| of the project before I've even learned that much about it.
|
| One example: Best of all, they work together.
| You can store your .glp blueprints in a Docker container--
| creating software that is immortal in both environment and logic.
|
| This is nonsensical. The entire point of a container is it ought
| to contain only what's necessary to run the underlying software.
| It's just the production filesystem. Why would I put LLM prompts
| that don't get used at runtime in a container?
|
| What other language-agnostic methods of describing complex
| systems is your project inspired by? In competition with?
|
| ---
|
| By using this tool, a programmer or team is sending the message
| that:
|
| "We expect LLM generated code to remain a deeply coupled part of
| our delivery process, indefinitely"
|
| But we didn't know about LLMs 5 years ago. What is the argument
| for defining your software in a way that depends on such a young
| technology? Most of the "safety" features here are related to how
| _unsafe_ the tech itself still is.
|
| "Nontrivial LLM driven rewrites of the code are expected, even
| encouraged"
|
| Why is the speedy rewriting of a system in a new language such a
| popular flex these days? Is it because it looks impressive, and
| LLMs make it easy? It's so silly.
|
| And if the language allows for limiting the code the LLM is
| allowed to modify, how is it going to help us keep our overall
| project language-agnostic?
| bdcravens wrote:
| I've found that writing pseudocode in a markdown file with little
| to no definitions (I may put a few non-obvious notes in the
| CLAUDE/AGENTS files) and telling the agent what language to turn
| it into generally works.
| Retr0id wrote:
| I've been thinking about something along these lines, but coupled
| with deterministic inference. At each "macro" invocation you'd
| also include hash-of-model, and hash-of-generated-text. (Note,
| determinism doesn't require temperature 0, so long as you can
| control the rng seed. But there are a lot of other things that
| make determinism hard)
|
| You could take it a step further and have a deterministic agent
| inside a deterministic VM, and you can share a whole project as
| {model hash, vm image hash, prompt, source tree hash} and have
| someone else deterministically reproduce it.
|
| Is this useful? Not sure. One use case I had in mind as a
| mechanism for distributing "forbidden software". You can't
| distribute software that violates DMCA, for example, but can you
| distribute a prompt?
| mpalmer wrote:
| Deterministic inference is mechanically indistinguishable from
| decompression or decryption, so if there's a way to one-weird-
| trick DMCA, it's probably not this.
| bee_rider wrote:
| You'd think that, but it sees like big business and
| governments are treating inference as somehow special. I
| dunno, maybe low temperatures can highlight this weird
| situation?
|
| Temperature is an easy knob to twist, after all. Somebody
| (not me I'm too poor to pay the lawyers) should do a search
| and find where the crime starts.
| Retr0id wrote:
| What does temperature have to do with anything?
| bee_rider wrote:
| Or however deterministic inference is supposed to happen.
| I don't know LLMs.
| mpalmer wrote:
| Well, it's still not deterministic even at temp 0. The tech
| described in my comment's parent is speculative, and
| technically it's not even inference, once it's perfectly
| reproducible.
|
| At that point it's retrieving results from a database.
|
| EDIT: how would OP address my main point, which is that
| det. inference is functionally equivalent to any arbitrary
| keyed data storage/retrieval system?
| Retr0id wrote:
| Deterministic inference isn't speculative, it's
| achievable if you want it. It's just not the default.
| whoamii wrote:
| Why didn't you implement this in... Glupe?
| kgeist wrote:
| Glupe means "stupid" in Slavic languages, was it on purpose?
| LatencyKills wrote:
| From their agent-rules.md:
|
| > This is not negotiable. This is not optional. You cannot
| rationalize your way out of this.
|
| Some days I really miss the predictability of a good old
| if/else block. /s
| Chance-Device wrote:
| But... why not just write pseudo code, or any language you
| actually know, and just ask the AI to port it to the language you
| want? That's a serious question by the way, is there some use
| case here I'm not seeing where learning this new syntax and
| running this actually helps instead of being extra steps nobody
| needs?
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| I wrote a programming language, some time back. You need a good
| reason to add to the tumult in the marketplace, and I thought I
| had one. My language was for discrete control systems. You could
| declare samplers for data values (interval, sensor, type) and
| name them as variables. You could create control actions by
| listing a set of one or more sampler variables in brackets. Once
| there were 'fresh' values for all of the samplers, the action
| would be invoked.
|
| It had the usual functions and i/o library stuff. In fact I wrote
| a tool to absorb other library headers e.g. C or C++ and product
| blocks that my compiler could link with, and voila your program
| could call those external libraries.
|
| We used it for a couple of contracts. Some of the control
| engineers were enthusiastic; some not so much. One more thing to
| learn.
| TZubiri wrote:
| Some feedback, in order from most to least important:
|
| > 1- installing with irm
| https://raw.githubusercontent.com/alonsovm44/glupe/master/in... |
| iex
|
| That is high risk, don't ask people to do that, especially when
| it's completely unnecessary for what the language is, and the
| language isn't providing value, it's just esoterical.
|
| >2. "Glupe isolates AI logic into semantic containers, so your
| manual code stays safe."
|
| Watchout for light-AI psychosis. This existed before AI to be
| fair, but using words in a way that doesn't convey meaning. Maybe
| what's going on is that you use them with ChatGPT and it either
| understands or doesn't but follow along. So make sure to
| prioritize language that you develop with humans, not AI. And try
| to simplify your language and the message you were trying to
| convey, because you missed bigtime with that sentence.
|
| >3. The language itself misses the mark. It looks like it's C++
| with some modifications?
|
| 4- it's also not a language but a terminal? Try to get the trust
| of your users by doing one thing well before promising to do it
| all. A bit of humility pays off, you can't do everything anyways.
| empressplay wrote:
| I agree that some form of shorthand between pseudocode and actual
| code would be really useful to improve accuracy on LLM requests
| but I don't think this is quite it. Ideally it would be as simple
| as possible, but not rely on language-specific paradigms. Sort of
| a pidgin that everyone would understand, that used white space
| and indentation to indicate things like loops and such. Something
| a normal person could look at and still largely comprehend.
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