I’ve been working on Rye since 2018. It’s a project of joy — but also because I believe there is a potential to create something of value to others, eventually.
Even people living under a rock know we’ve entered the age of LLMs. I don’t jump to ships too soon, but eventually, even I had to admit: code can get generated from prompts. And in many situations — with a smart prompter — the results are quite OK.
Even if you disagree, genie can’t be put back in the bottle. Technical progress generally only moves forward.
Trying to persuade programmers to switch to a language you made up is very ambitious (or just mad) on its own. When all the buzz is about not needing to use any programming language at all, it makes even less sense.
The falling tide lowers all boats — and my is not even in the water yet.
LLMs currently need programming languages, they can’t just generate executables directly from your prompt. Absurdly they also need examples, tutorials, blogposts, Stack Overflow answers, which they are now well, killing.
LLMs are on the level of transpiler languages (Coffeescript?). They need the host languages — but if really succsessful, they would end up killing the host.
If no one uses Python anymore, will anyone still work on Python? (Just an example.)
Probably, in the long term, LLMs* will have/generate their own runtimes, libraries, and everything else. (* Or what comes next.)
So the real question — does it make sense to keep developing Rye? — boils down to:
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