Can't really argue with that, but In my experience, coding agents work quite well with TypeScript too. :)
Go is an ideal language for AI-assisted software engineering
21–30 of 586 posts
Re: Go is an ideal language for AI-assisted software engineering
#22Earlier quoted context omitted.
Rust compiler is a tyrant. Type system is strict. Borrow checker is relentless. LLMs can't slop too much without being beaten up by the compiler.
This is true. I'd like metrics on this though. It could be that LLMs find go easier so they end up writing better code and rarely hitting static errors like a human would in rust. IT could be through scientific measurements that the benefits of static checking could be negligible for LLMs. No way to know until someone does the science on this. Until then it's just people saying that more static checking is better. Bu…
Until we can measure slop accurately it's all guesswork
Re: Go is an ideal language for AI-assisted software engineering
#23Rust is better. It just is. Go is not bad. But as a long time go advocate, the hurdle for my teams using rust is gone, and thus everything is now rust.
Personally I find Rust a lot harder to read than Go. If you're going to have an agent write most of your code readability is very important.
For whatever reason, maybe not even logical ones, Go repulses me. I don't know why exactly, I like the idea of Go, but the aesthetics rub me wrong.
I think it's the use of pointers and "if err != nil {}" error handling spam. It reads as a highly compromised imitation of Python and C rather than a solid execution of some other idea.
Rust is not the most beautiful language out there but it doesn't trigger any such reaction for me. The ? operator and "match", which I use constantly, more than compensate for some of the sigil noise which I barely need to look at much less write most of the time. So Rust wins on that comparison for me.
The "func name() -> retval" syntax also grew on me. I like the fact that Python type annotations copied that approach, and C-style declarations look ugly to me now. Same with C-style /* */ comments.
Re: Go is an ideal language for AI-assisted software engineering
#24[dead]
Re: Go is an ideal language for AI-assisted software engineering
#25Nice try
Re: Go is an ideal language for AI-assisted software engineering
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
Personally I find Rust a lot harder to read than Go. If you're going to have an agent write most of your code readability is very important.
I have an agent read most of the code as well. The agent explains things to me in plain english. The default sentiment is humans should read code it's more progressive and a leap of faith to start giving that up. Obviously, I get why you feel humans still reading code is important, but if you look at the progress of AI for the past couple of years, that gap is closing. The trendlines speak of a future where it become…
> Now most people don't write code.
I use LLM daily to write code for and "with" me, I also write code without LLM. Most people I come across mix it up. A few do it all by hand, and equally few all by LLM I would say. Is that just in my corner of the world?
Re: Go is an ideal language for AI-assisted software engineering
#27Definitely agree with this article.
At Netflix, I lead the Go language guild. We've been seen increasing reports of users finding their AI agents writing better Go code than other languages, and increasing reports of projects favouring Go over other languages.
Two additional notes I'll add:
- Go has _great_ resources on writing good Go code, including treasure troves at https://go.dev/doc/effective_go and https://google.github.io/styleguide/go/. edit: Sorry, I forgot to add: we give these resources to AI agents and they use them to produce even better Go code.
- For a language team, Go is a dream. The `go fix` tooling, AST/SSA packages, ease of reading and writing `go.mod` (go mod edit, etc), and various other "platform"-y features make modifying Go code at scale way easier than other languages.
Re: Go is an ideal language for AI-assisted software engineering
#28Rust is better. It just is. Go is not bad. But as a long time go advocate, the hurdle for my teams using rust is gone, and thus everything is now rust.
Personally I find Rust a lot harder to read than Go. If you're going to have an agent write most of your code readability is very important.
I'll qualify this from my POV (which may be different than GP's).
Go's historic maintainability strong suit has been its simplicity and consistency. The syntax is, relatively speaking, lightweight, the language invites complexity through composition, and information density for any unit of code is typically quite low (which isn't necessarily a bad thing).
In my opinion, though, these are all drawbacks, and Rust addresses all of them. It's syntactically and semantically much heavier, leading to its oft-maligned steep learning curve. It has, uniquely among the major languages, I think, a syntax for expressing variable lifetimes (with its own unintuitive semantics). It stuffs lots of abstraction into a hodgepodge of terse semantics and punctuation.
It sucks to read, until you get really used to it. Then it tends to read really quickly, and, at least for me, it's easier to reason about a conceptually-broad piece of logic if I don't have to jump between different locations in a file, a module, or a package to do it.
With Go, I find it more difficult to get into a flow state, and easier for my eyes to glaze over when looking over large diffs.
It's not lost on me that these are purely subjective arguments, though. My preference remains with Rust, and that goes back to before I used LLMs.
I'm also aware that Go is very prescriptive about how you write it; it's explicitly opinionated, and Rust doesn't have that. It means that most Go code bases will look more alike. I consider this an anti-feature; I believe code should be able to conform to the problem space or product and a good team will find the best way to do that.
Re: Go is an ideal language for AI-assisted software engineering
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
can you elaborate?
Rust compiler is a tyrant. Type system is strict. Borrow checker is relentless. LLMs can't slop too much without being beaten up by the compiler.
True but if the reviewer doesn’t have an intimate understanding of rust then the fact it can’t “slop” is no different than unreadable slop.
Go is simple, no “magic” marcos or meta programming even with just a little programming in any language it’s not hard to understand what the go code is doing.
Re: Go is an ideal language for AI-assisted software engineering
#30Who cares? Languages are tools, LLMs are tools. Use the ones more appropriate for what you are trying to do.
Is Go better than CSS if you are doing web layouts? Is it better than zig if you are outputting minimal wasm deliverables? Is it better than swift if you are doing iOS specific development? Is it better than bash for OS scripting?
Think about what you are doing and choose appropriately. This was true before LLMs.
Are you having fun? Chose LISP then