JetBrains, creator of the popular Kotlin programming language, is developing a new programming language intended to make AI and code much more controllable and transparent.
In a July 23 interview with InfoWorld, JetBrains CEO Kirill Skrygan elaborated on company plans for an as-yet-unnamed language that would describe a program at a higher level of abstraction. He reflected on how computer code originally was written in Assembler and moved to higher levels of abstraction with C and C++, then on to yet higher levels with Java and C#. “And now it’s time to move even higher,” Skrygan said. “So when we write the code, we’ll basically lay out the ontology, the object-oriented architecture, what we have in mind, or have somewhere written in design docs.” This “whole architecture program” will make AI code generation more controllable, transparent, and useful, he said.
JetBrains is exploring how to make this new language a derivative from Kotlin, but Skrygan believes the derivative should be English. “So basically, you write the design doc in English, maybe with some semantics, with some abstract paragraph, some other things which might help.” He provided the example of creating a cross-platform application that works on iPhone, Android, the web, or other platforms. “So instead of writing three applications, you write it in a special programming language, which is basically English, which describes how you want to see this application in a very specified way, and then AI agents, together with JetBrains tooling, will generate the code of all of these platforms,” Skrygan said.
