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Go is an ideal language for AI-assisted software engineering

developers.googleblog.com

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Re: Go is an ideal language for AI-assisted software engineering

#71

Post by devmor »

mg wrote: post #41

My expectation is that AI will give us a way to nicely quantify how productivity is impacted by choice of language. Because we can rerun the same request as often as we like and compare the results. And I expect that it will turn out Python is the most productive. As it is most easy to reason about. It allows for the most elegant expression of the idea behind a program. The first tests I have seen seem to confirm thi…

How do you propose to quantify the terms "elegant" and "easy to reason about"? What unit of measurement do you use for these?

This sounds like your personal feelings, not quantification.

Re: Go is an ideal language for AI-assisted software engineering

#73

Post by soupbowl »

wltr wrote: post #48
hugodan wrote: post #30

Who 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 LL…

Been doing bash scripting for years. Tried Go recently, on my, it’s so much better for everything OS scripting. I regret I haven’t started with Go years ago. All my scripts are rewritten to Go. I kept only a handful, those that are just a few lines and no logic.

Are you using 'go run' or compiling these scripts? Just curious about what you are up to as I was considering moving my scripts from bash to go.

Re: Go is an ideal language for AI-assisted software engineering

#74

Post by rudedogg »

I keep seeing these language specific proclamations, and they are annoying and reek of inexperience to me.

I’ve had a great time doing LLM assisted coding in Zig, and it seems comparable to the generic Typescript/React I do at work.

I don’t doubt simplicity and good PL design pay dividends, but everyone’s favorite language can’t be the silver bullet in our new LLM world. Things just don’t add up, and I keep seeing it for Erlang, Gleam, Lisp, C, Rust, Go, TypeScript, Python, etc.

And to pick on Go a little bit, I don’t think it has any unique qualities that make it better for LLMs, where I think you could make that argument for other modern languages that offer new features leveraging their compilers and enforcing more correctness guarantees.

Re: Go is an ideal language for AI-assisted software engineering

#75

Post by CoolestBeans »

I love the sleight of hand this blog post tries to pull off here. It doesn't matter than Go isn't fun to write because the AI is doing it now! Yeah so it sucked for the last twenty years? I know the main thesis is that Go is holistically good at software engineering so its weakness as a programming language is minimized. I've made a similar arguments that coding agents push the burden more into the other aspects of software engineering. But like, we all see what Google is doing here right? They want to declare that the rules have changed so Go's weakness transmutes into a strength. I'm also not buying it.

Re: Go is an ideal language for AI-assisted software engineering

#76

Post by YuechenLi »

I wouldn't say Go is IDEAL for AI coding, but it certainly has the case for one of the best programming languages that currently AI uses. Go definitely has its share of problems for human authors because it's so verbose and boilerplate heavy, which means it's less of an issue with LLMs than it is for human coders. Rust is comparatively worse, because LLMs don't make the same coding mistakes that humans do that justifies the existence of the borrow checker, it only seems to get in their way, and they spend more time fighting Rust's infrastructure than writing code.

The biggest barrier to Go adoption seems to be Google's internal resistance to migrate C++/Java code bases to Go and refusal to admit that Go is an amazing application programming language and not really a systems programming language for bare metal OS/driver work. For example, one of the biggest barriers to Fuchsia adoption has been Google asking people to commit to Dart, I think Fuchsia would have fared a lot better as an Android successor/alternative if the official applications programming language just been Go.

(BTW Carbon isn't even a real programming language, it's still somehow stuck at 0.0.0.0 after 4 years of development which is honestly insane.)

Oh, so, little bit of self-promotion: if you like Go but is frustrated with the ergonomics of it, I would ask you to try out the programming language I developed, Oct, for LLM coding which you can kinda think of as my attempt at making Kotlin for Go's Java: It uses a codegen compiler and compiles to a plain Go binary, so it runs on everything that Go runs, and there is a lot of extra features as well: Rust style exhaustive tagged/payload enums/`match`, C#'s immutable records updated with `with`, exhaustive error handling easy parallel concurrency, xUnit.NET style unit test harness, TypeScript style compile time constraints, F# like SI unit system, Go code generation metaprogramming, etc. Would love to have some Go experts here on HN take a gander at it and provide some feedback.

https://github.com/yuechen-li-dev/oct

Re: Go is an ideal language for AI-assisted software engineering

#77

Post by liuliu »

1. The syntax surface is smaller, allowing less LLM "creativity; 2. The error handling is mechanical, which LLM clearly prefers (LLM is already trigger happy about writing tons of throw / try...catch.. in other languages, doing tons of `if err` is just in it comfort-zone).

Re: Go is an ideal language for AI-assisted software engineering

#78

Post by mbrumlow »

simonw wrote: post #6
mbrumlow wrote: post #2

Rust 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.

Might be unpopular, but agents write too much code for humans to read in any meaningful time frame. Using agents to generate code to then require humans to slowly consume it defeats a lot of the speed you gain from AI.

I my self and teams members are slowly reading less code and requiring agents to prove things work the way we want in other ways.

Re: Go is an ideal language for AI-assisted software engineering

#80

Post by sgt »

YuechenLi wrote: post #76

I wouldn't say Go is IDEAL for AI coding, but it certainly has the case for one of the best programming languages that currently AI uses. Go definitely has its share of problems for human authors because it's so verbose and boilerplate heavy, which means it's less of an issue with LLMs than it is for human coders. Rust is comparatively worse, because LLMs don't make the same coding mistakes that humans do that justif…

So in terms of the mainstream languages, what would you say would be the most ideal language? (At least until Oct takes off!). Perhaps modern Java? .. Or even Zig?
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