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> On the opposite I predict that in the next decades, the most accessible languages will be swallowed by AI generators, not for the language but because they're addressing simple problems, and that over time it will be figured that generating code for high-level languages and fast moving targets is a pain, and that languages that impose lots of constraints do not bring any benefit anymore once you remove the human from the equation.

And how many times have we heard that :-) Was it the 1980s? Was it called "The Last One"? And given what we're hearing about AI, that it's biased, that it makes mistakes, that - basically - it's just as crap as humans are at actually getting things right, why do you think history is going to turn out different THIS time round, as opposed to all the previous times?

Assembly code replaced machine code. 3GLs replaced assembly. 4GLs tried to replace 3GLs and failed. AI is trying to replace 3GLs ... I fully expect it to fail ...

There's 3GLs and there's 3GLs. There's the "plenty of rope to hang yourself" ones - C, C++, Pick, ... There's the formally mathematical ones, Fortran, APL, SQL, ...

And at the end of the day, I think the biggest fly in the ointment is the Cretan Paradox, Godel's incompleteness theorem. The fact that logic is not logical is going to kill any attempt to write "The Last One".

Cheers,
Wol

So I agree that you shouldn't expect Rust to somehow be an important language in 100 years, a far greater distance in time than from when Grace Hopper suggested the machine should convert the program into machine code (rather than people doing that work) to today.

But Computation is much more fundamental than a particular programming language, or even a programming paradigm. Even if you're much more sceptical of Church-Turing than I am, it's a very important idea, likely up there with zero (the additive identity) in terms of not being a fad.

And I don't think the AI generators swallow up "accessible languages". Cobbling together stuff that maybe kinda sorta works in C++ is easier because "No, that's wrong" is rare, IFNDR means most likely your program compiles despite being nonsense, and it just has mysterious bugs which these generative models can't help you with beyond more haphazard changes that may introduce yet more mysterious bugs.

On the contrary, AI code generators benefit from targeting languages with lots of constraints. Those languages move work from whoever's reviewing and debugging the code (humans, today) to whoever's writing the code (AI).