Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

What's the best programming language for coding agents?

danluu.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

1–10 of 200 posts

Re: What's the best programming language for coding agents?

#2

Post by summarybot »

Cool line of questioning, but one piece of information is pivotal and critically not-yet-included: equivalent accomplishments in each language. For example, if I want to write standard things: web server, memoized fibonnaci, recipe search engine, what's the length-and-density of these outputs for each language? I think that would add in some ~normalization.

Re: What's the best programming language for coding agents?

#4

Post by 9rx »

_doctor_love wrote: post #3

I love Dan's writing. I really do. But I don't understand why he doesn't have some basic styling on his blog so that it's easier to read.

Users being able to supply their own stylesheet is a core tenant of CSS. Go nuts and make it look however your heart desires!

Re: What's the best programming language for coding agents?

#5

Post by nylonstrung »

One thing worth noting is that syntactic density doesn't necessarily mean cheaper because because symbols don't chunk/tokenize as well as plain English

What I see from results like this is that the delta between languages is small enough now that it's hard to justify not not using something like Rust for the performance and correctness benefits if you're using LLMs and it fits the domain

Re: What's the best programming language for coding agents?

#6

Post by _doctor_love »

9rx wrote: post #4
_doctor_love wrote: post #3

I love Dan's writing. I really do. But I don't understand why he doesn't have some basic styling on his blog so that it's easier to read.

Users being able to supply their own stylesheet is a core tenant of CSS. Go nuts and make it look however your heart desires!

Supply my own stylesheet? No thank you, I'm not here to do work for free.

Re: What's the best programming language for coding agents?

#7

Post by 9rx »

_doctor_love wrote: post #6
9rx wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Users being able to supply their own stylesheet is a core tenant of CSS. Go nuts and make it look however your heart desires!

Supply my own stylesheet? No thank you, I'm not here to do work for free.

Is doing something for yourself really working for free? That's an interesting take. But I can understand why you don't want this for yourself, so enjoy the page in all its splendour as it is already!

Re: What's the best programming language for coding agents?

#8

Post by aleph_minus_one »

> Dynamically typed languages generally have a lower LLM token cost than traditional statically typed languages because omitting explicit type declarations makes the code more compact.

If this was true, the programming languages that are very much on the left side of

> https://danuker.go.ro/programming-languages.html#non-math-ma...

> https://danuker.go.ro/programming-languages.html#overall-map

should be very ideal for LLMs, in particular if they are dynamically typed.

What I can tell you is: I experimented with AI prompts for generating Wolfram (Mathematica) code using some LLMs, and I can tell you that the results were very disappointing: in my experience LLMs have difficulties with programming languages that are

- very concise, and

- for which there is less code publicly available.

Wolfram (Mathematica) is a good example of such a programming language.

Re: What's the best programming language for coding agents?

#9

Post by _doctor_love »

9rx wrote: post #7
_doctor_love wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Supply my own stylesheet? No thank you, I'm not here to do work for free.

Is doing something for yourself really working for free? That's an interesting take. But I can understand why you don't want this for yourself, so enjoy the page in all its splendour as it is already!

So every person who reads Dan's blog and finds the layout too dense, they should write and maintain a stylesheet for his site?

And every person globally should do this as well for any other website that doesn't have a good default reading experience?

Re: What's the best programming language for coding agents?

#10

Post by chiply »

_doctor_love wrote: post #3

I love Dan's writing. I really do. But I don't understand why he doesn't have some basic styling on his blog so that it's easier to read.

I love this take because I had exactly the opposite idea. I thought the combo of remarkably simple text (not even wrapped) with incredible, full width visualizations was chef's kiss. I really like the balance there personally, but I hear you. Does your browser have Reader Mode or something like that? I don't use those tools personally, but I believe they will recast the text parts into something that renders optimally for reading (ideal font size, number of characters per line, etc....).
Post reply on HN