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Go is an ideal language for AI-assisted software engineering

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121–130 of 586 posts

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

#121
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For a language team, Go is a dream. I agree very strongly. There's no debate about things that have 1000000 permutations in other languages. e.g. The correct format can always be checked by `go fmt` with no real config options. the end.

I mean this isn't true, formatting is the most trivial part. And so many languages have an opinionated formatter these days (e.g. Black)

what is "Black"? (For hopefully obvious reasons, I couldn't find results with google, lol)

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

#122
Given the date and the recent DeepMind shakeups, this blog post is obviously ordered from the very top.

Pichai wants to eliminate engineers, and DeepMind wasn't fast enough or too noble for it. Now people need to be propagandized for their obsolescence.

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

#124
post #108
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah, I see. I misunderstood.Is the report from an internal source, so it can't be shared? If not, I'd appreciate it if you could send me a link so I can look into it too.

it’s probably just some informal Slack messages between colleagues that is being described as “reports from users”. There is no Report here

You are being downvoted but I think this is correct. I doubt Netflix is really doing a double blind RCT on which languages produce better AI pull requests. How would that even work, have two versions of each service in different languages?

It's anecdata and maybe, MAYBE, a spreadsheet. Or a Google Form somewhere.

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

#125
The readability is a plus at the same time if I target Rust and build it modular with lots of tests and io pure modules. The review part is not as important if the AI reviews it from various perspectives. With rust I get so much better performance and efficiency.

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

#127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean this isn't true, formatting is the most trivial part. And so many languages have an opinionated formatter these days (e.g. Black)

what is "Black"? (For hopefully obvious reasons, I couldn't find results with google, lol)

Black for Python https://github.com/psf/black

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

#128
post #68

I'd argue Go is not on a "Pareto frontier" and that no matter how you value the various attributes of programming languages, a fair assessment will never select Go. A simple example is: if you highly value language popularity; Go is not most popular. If you highly value a type system that catches errors; Go's type system catches fewer errors than others. Etc. There is no weighted sum of attributes that will select Go…

Here's how my assessment selected Go (long before LLMs): - I had to write a moderately complex program. I didn't want to do it in C, and I didn't want to learn Rust. - So I spent roughly about 2 hours becoming familiar with Go and playing around in Go playground. I decided that this would work. - And then I got started on my program and I was immediately productive and that software is still running today, along with…

> I didn't want to do it in C, and I didn't want to learn Rust.

Sounds like you made a decision right there. The rest is just retro-justification, not a logical argument or comparative between options. It works for you, good.

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

#129
post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Uber reported that their Go code has quantitatively more concurrency bugs than code in other languages, and while to me it seems obvious from looking at Go's concurrency model, this is backed by actual data. Is there any quantitative data to back the claim that Go is better in an LLM based workflow than another popular language?

Matches my experience as well. Go fans have conflated "can easily make something concurrent" with "does concurrency well." Go's primitives for concurrency should almost never be used directly and Engineers below a certain skill level shouldn't be allowed to use them directly ever for long running production code. As another example, Go still has not yielded a correct implementation of Raft or Paxos while there are do…

Java has so many excellent concurrency containers, plus robust 3rd-party containers like JCTools. It puzzles me why Go communities do not offer such containers.

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

#130

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 s…

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