Has there been any actual head to head comparison of this using frontier models? Any benchmarks that purport to measure this?
Ask HN: Any objective research on which languages are best for AI agents?
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Re: Ask HN: Any objective research on which languages are best for AI agents?
#2Re: Ask HN: Any objective research on which languages are best for AI agents?
#3The frontier moves quickly enough that empiric testing is often out of date by the time that it’s published.
Re: Ask HN: Any objective research on which languages are best for AI agents?
#4The frontier moves quickly enough that empiric testing is often out of date by the time that it’s published.
For sure! It's possible there are relatively invariant properties that make one language or another "better" for LLM coding in general though (even if that's just the self-fulfilling prophecy of size of the training corpus).
I’ve seen a lot of blog posts with fairly dubious claims here with relatively flimsy evidence. And I’ve seen a few papers trying to tackle the topic. But I think it’s a very open area of research currently.
Re: Ask HN: Any objective research on which languages are best for AI agents?
#5Re: Ask HN: Any objective research on which languages are best for AI agents?
#6Conclusion: Elixir was the best (had the highest problem solve rate).
Reasons (Theo's interpretation):
- code collocation, where documentation is integrated directly within the source code
- design philosophy of a language (readability, clear idioms, and strict expectation management)
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Sources from video:
- https://github.com/Tencent-Hunyuan/AutoCodeBenchmark/tree/ma...
- https://martinalderson.com/posts/which-programming-languages...
- https://simonwillison.net/2026/Jan/19/nanolang/#atom-everyth...