I have been wondering what an AI first programming language might look like and my closest guess is something like Scheme/Lisp. Maybe they get more popular in the long run.

LLM's are mainly trained on English natural language text, so you'll want a language that looks as much as possible like English. COBOL is it, then.

Smalltalk offers several excellent features for LLM agents:

- Very small methods that function as standalone compilation units, enabling extremely fast compilation.

- Built-in, fast, and effective code browsing capabilities (e.g., listing senders, implementors, and instance variable users...). This makes it easy for the agent to extract only the required context from the system.

- Powerful runtime reflectivity and easily accessible debugging capabilities.

- A simple grammar with a more natural, language-like feel compared to Lisp.

- Natural sandboxing

I'm working on what I hope is an AI-first language now, but I'm taking the opposite approach: something like Swift/DartTypeScript with plenty of high level constructs that compactly describe intent.

I'm focusing on very high-quality feedback from the compiler, and sandboxing via WASM to be able to safely iterate without human intervention - which Hoot has as well.