Additionally just the ability to put an entire language into context for an LLM - a single document explaining everything - is also likely to close the gap.
I was skimming some nano files and while I can't say I loved how it looked, it did look extremely clear. Likely a benefit.
https://github.com/jordanhubbard/nanolang/blob/main/MEMORY.m...
Optimistically I dumped the whole thing into Claude Opus 4.5 as a system prompt to see if it could generate a one-shot program from it:
llm -m claude-opus-4.5 \
-s https://raw.githubusercontent.com/jordanhubbard/nanolang/refs/heads/main/MEMORY.md \
'Build me a mandelbrot fractal CLI tool in this language'
> /tmp/fractal.nano
So I fired up Claude Code inside a checkout of the nanolang and told it how to run the compiler and let it fix the problems... which DID work. Here's that transcript:
https://gisthost.github.io/?9696da6882cb6596be6a9d5196e8a7a5...
And the finished code, with its output in a comment: https://gist.github.com/simonw/e7f3577adcfd392ab7fa23b1295d0...
So yeah, a good LLM can definitely figure out how to use this thing given access to the existing documentation and the ability to run that compiler.
The thing that really unlocked it was Claude being able to run a file listing against nanolang/examples and then start picking through the examples that were most relevant to figuring out the syntax: https://gisthost.github.io/?9696da6882cb6596be6a9d5196e8a7a5...
Summary:
- Co-created FreeBSD.
- Led UNIX technologies at Apple for 13 years
- iXSystems, lead FreeNAS
- idk something about Uber
- Senior Director for GPU Compute Software at NVIDIA
For whatever it’s worth.
Apparently he did as well[1]: "The start of the 2.0 ports collection. No sup repository yet, but I'll make one when I wake up again.. :)" Submitted by: jkh Aug 21, 1994
[1] https://github.com/freebsd/freebsd-ports/commit/7ca702f09f29...
Interesting commit starting Ports 2.0. Three version of bash, four versions of Emacs, plus jove.
We didn't end up with Lean and Rust, for a lack of understanding in how to create strong specifications. Pascal-like languages fell out of favour, despite having higher readability.
Back in the day, JetBrains tried revision-controlling AST trees or psi-nodes in their parlance. That project was cancelled, as it became a research challenge. That was 10 years ago or so. At this point, things may work out well, time will tell.
https://github.com/benj-edwards/atari800-ai https://github.com/benj-edwards/bobbin
GPU poor here though...
To quote someone (you...) on the internet:
> More generally, don't ask random people on the internet to do work for you for free.
That GRPO works?
> Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), a variant reinforcement learning (RL) algorithm of Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) (Schulman et al., 2017). GRPO foregoes the critic model, instead estimating the baseline from group scores, significantly reducing training resources. By solely using a subset of English instruction tuning data, GRPO obtains a substantial improvement over the strong DeepSeekMath-Instruct, including both in-domain (GSM8K: 82.9% → 88.2%, MATH: 46.8% → 51.7%) and out-of-domain mathematical tasks (e.g., CMATH: 84.6% → 88.8%) during the reinforcement learning phase
Page 2 of https://arxiv.org/pdf/2402.03300
That GRPO on code works?
> Similarly, for code competition prompts, a compiler can be utilized to evaluate the model’s responses against a suite of predefined test cases, thereby generating objective feedback on correctness
Page 4 of https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.12948
Ed: There seems to be an UTF-8 library:
https://github.com/jordanhubbard/nanolang/tree/main/modules/...