Bret Taylor: prediction

Transcript context

…Yeah, exactly. I'll force you to make a prediction. You know, Python's roughly 30 years old. In 30 years from now, is Rust going to be bigger than Python? I don't know this, but just, I don't even know this is a prediction. I just am sort of like saying stuff I hope is true. I would like to see an AI native programming language and programming system, and I use language because I'm not sure language is even the right thing, but I hope in 30 years, there's an AI native way we make [00:48:00] software that is wholly uncorrelated with the current set of programming languages. or not uncorrelated, but I think most programming languages today were designed to be efficiently authored by people and some have different trade offs. You know, you have Haskell and others that were designed for abstractions for parallelism and things like that. You have programming languages like Python, which are designed to be very easily written, sort of like Perl and Python lineage, which is why data scientists use it. It's it can, it has a. Interactive mode, things like that. And I love, I'm a huge Python fan. So despite all my Python trash talk, a huge Python fan wrote at least two of my three companies were exclusively written in Python and then C came out of the birth of Unix and it wasn't the first, but certainly the most prominent first step after assembly language, right? Where you had higher level abstractions rather than and going beyond go to, to like abstractions, [00:49:00] like the for loop and the while loop. So I just think that if the act of writing code is no longer a meaningful human exercise, maybe it will be, I don't know. I'm just saying it sort of feels like maybe it's one of those parts of history that just will sort of like go away, but there's still the role of this offer engineer, like the person actually building the system. Right. And. What does a programming system for that form factor look like? And I, I just have a, I hope to be just like I mentioned, I remember I was at Facebook in the very early days when, when, what is now react was being created. And I remember when the, it was like released open source I had left by that time and I was just like, this is so fucking cool. Like, you know, to basically model your app independent of the data flowing through it, just made everything easier. And then now. You know, I can create, like there's a lot of the front end software gym play is like a little chaotic for me, to be honest with you. It is like, it's sort of like [00:50:00] abstraction soup right now for me, but like some of those core ideas felt really ergonomic. I just wanna, I'm just looking forward to the day when someone comes up with a programming system that feels both really like an aha moment, but completely foreign to me at the same time. Because they created it with sort of like from first principles recognizing that like. Authoring code in an editor is maybe not like the primary like reason why a programming system exists anymore. And I think that's like, that would be a very exciting day for me. Yeah, I would say like the various versions of this discussion have happened at the end of the day, you still need to precisely communicate what you want. As a manager of people, as someone who has done many, many legal contracts, you know how hard that is. And then now we have to talk to machines doing that and AIs interpreting what we mean and reading our minds effectively. I don't know how to get across that barrier of translating human intent to instructions. And yes, it can be more declarative, but I don't know if it'll ever Crossover from being [00:51:00] a programming language to something more than that.…

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