Victor Taelin has been doing interesting PLT research for 10+ years.
I suggest you read his history: https://gist.github.com/VictorTaelin/77fd5a2a8a4a07e1da6157e...
before making slop accusations. Older variant of what became Bend is 5 years old, so definitely not "vibe coded": https://github.com/HigherOrderCO/HVM1
This is a very strange comment
First, I think everything I said was respectful and rooted in the content of the Bend page rather than an assault of Victor as a person. I’m very confused by your random appeal to the author’s reputation here. He seems like a smart and cool dude, and I still have things to say in response to what’s presented here for Bend
Second, the paper is openly written by Fable 5.1, so I’m not making any unfounded accusations
To pick on a few examples:
> a random vibecoded project
> If this weren't slop...
> I'm glad you're having fun vibecoding, and I like that you're interested in this area of research/engineering
These impute both his motives ("fun") and particularly his level of seriousness ("random project" and "I like that you're interested"—imputing passivity, as opposed to "are studying" or "are researching," which would be more appropriate given the amount of time invested). They're all dismissive and patronizing.
I would actually regard this as bullying. Some feedback.
(I suspect you're an academic, either a researcher or student. I know from my own experience that bullying is endemic in many academic research environments, so if you find the negativity you're receiving "strange," I suggest finding a therapist, who may help you understand how your communication habits could be negatively affecting other people and unintentionally damaging your relationships.)
stschaef‘S comment was on topic and a critique (albeit sharp) of the work.
Your comment is a personal attack though, and much closer to bullying.
FWIW the author can and has spoken for themselves and noted the comment was “reasonable”.
In my culture it was ad personam, not even trying, and it’s fantastic that it’s been pointed out in a respectful way and reacted to with calm by all participants.
The author was very polite to even reply at all.
Victor put 5+ years of research into this. You can find many of previous versions (which use different approach, do a different kind of a thing, etc.) on the github. "Bend2" in particular have been in development for 2 years.
Calling this "a random vibecoded project" is rather disrespectful, don't you think?
Regarding the paper, he states it clearly "designed by the human author". That's not at all the same as just asking Fable to write a paper. I mean the important thing is ideas, not the way they are described.
Please tell me how "I'm glad you're having fun vibecoding" is not disrespectful?
I thought that you thought Bend web site is all that is to it and wanted to point to relevant information. But if you think that "having fun vibecoding" is an appropriate thing to say to somebody who spent many years doing research, I don't know what else to say.
Again, as a "proof of research" take a look at : https://github.com/VictorTaelin/Interaction-Type-Theory that's 3 year old, pre-dates Fable, but OMG doesn't look like a paper.
Again, very strange
External parties can’t do any meaningful discrimination between human and agent effort when the agent is doing the communicating. One may only read what’s there
I’m not saying that the author is inept or that they have done no work. There can be plenty of great underlying mathematics behind something that is vibecoded.
The reason I worry about the use of agents here is not because it invalidates any ideas or research done by the author; rather, it editorializes and oversells. It presents the claims of the work as an all encompassing solution to all of the worlds problems
There may very well be tons of great ideas here. However as presented, it reads as though the language is the solution to creating vibecoded apps and is equipowerful to state of the art proof assistants while being orders of magnitude more performant. That is a huge claim that has not yet been substantiated, and I do not believe that solely a human is currently making that claim
That's a start-up style marketing: when you make a product you focus on a big vision and positive sides and de-emphasize weaknesses. I'm afraid that's actually 100% Victor's decision to do it this way, and it seems to be working in terms of generating hype: it got ~4k likes on X, which is a lot for a new language.
Regarding substantiation -- they released source code and demos. As far as I understand, the weakness is that proofs are very verbose as there are no strategies. etc. However, they are making a separate service for making these proofs using proprietary technology: https://bend-lang.com/bender
> Again, as a "proof of research" take a look at : https://github.com/VictorTaelin/Interaction-Type-Theory that's 3 year old, pre-dates Fable, but OMG doesn't look like a paper.
Yes, it doesn't look like a paper at all. I can see the idea, and it's an interesting idea, but no proofs that it works, no measurements, and no proper citations.
Nobody claims Victor hasn't done a lot of research. But academically inclined people typically expect claims to be substantiated either formally or empirically or both.
A complete implementation have been released, how is that not a substantiation?
Academic people might have more trust in a paper which when through a lengthy publication process. But if you think about it, it's not a better proof than a direct access to the thing. It used to be hard to try out software but with modern tech it literally takes minutes...
How do you know the implementation is complete or that it works well?
Have you evaluated it?
Wouldn’t you be inclined to withhold any claims of anything being substantiated until it’s actually been evaluated?
Wait what? Have you? Why are you posting passive aggressive unfounded dismissals posing as questions?