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.
There 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.
Go is one of the most verbose mainstream programming languages, so that's a pretty terrible example.
To you maybe, but Go is running a large amount of internet infrastructure today.
How does that relate to Go being a verbose language?
Its 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.
Verbosity is an objective metric.
Code readability is another, correlating one, but this is more subjective. To me go scores pretty low here - code flow would be readable were it not for the huge amount of noise you get from error "handling" (it is mostly just syntactic ceremony, often failing to properly handle the error case, and people are desensitized to these blocks so code review are more likely to miss these).
For function signatures, they made it terser - in my subjective opinion - at the expense of readability. There were two very mainstream schools of thought with relation to type signature syntax, `type ident` and `ident : type`. Go opted for a third one that is unfamiliar to both bases, while not even having the benefits of the second syntax (e.g. easy type syntax, subjective but that : helps the eye "pattern match" these expressions).
Every time I hear complaints about error handling, I wonder if people have next to no try catch blocks or if they just do magic to hide that detail away in other languages? Because I still have to do error handling in other languages roughly the same? Am I missing something?
Maybe not a perfect example but it’s more lightweight than Java at least haha
If by lightweight you mean verbosity, then absolutely no.
In go every third line is a noisy if err check.
Well LLMs are made to be extremely verbose so it's a good match!
I 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.
Claude 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...