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Python: The Optimization Ladder

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Re: Python: The Optimization Ladder

#111

Post by scuff3d »

LarsDu88 wrote: post #110
scuff3d wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Go and Java/C# (if you forgo all the OOP nonsense) aren't much harder to write than Python, and you get far better performance. Not all the way to Rust level, bur close enough for most things with far less complexity.

As an AI engineer I kinda wish the community had landed on Go or something in the early days. C# would also be great, although it tends to be pretty verbose. Python just has too strong network effects. In the early days it was between python and lua (anyone remember torchlua?). GoLang was very much still getting traction and in development. Theres also the strong association of golang to google, c# to microsoft, and…

Yeah that bothers me too, but it's damn hard to get away from these days. Most language projects have significant corporate involvement one way or the other.

Go is criminally underrated in my opinion. It ticks so many boxes I'm surprised it hasn't seen more adoption.

Re: Python: The Optimization Ladder

#112

Post by retsibsi »

skeledrew wrote: post #32

I must admit that I'm amused by the people who find the writeup useful but are turned off by the AI "smell". And look forward to the day when all valued content reeks of said "smell"; let's see what detractors-for-no-good-reason do then (yes I'm a bit ticked by the attitude).

> detractors-for-no-good-reason

It's partly just a matter of taste; we can disagree on whether that's a good reason, but I'd be surprised if there were no writing styles that you personally find offputting.

The LLM smell is also a signal of low effort, and a signal that we as readers can't rely on our usual heuristics for judging credibility. The whole thing with LLMs is that they're great at producing polished, plausible-looking outputs, but they're still prone to bullshitting and making errors that don't match the usual human patterns. (And of course they're a great tool for churning out human-initiated disinformation.) If you don't have any kind of immune response against the LLM smell, I reckon you're probably absorbing more bs than you realise.

Re: Python: The Optimization Ladder

#113

Post by LarsDu88 »

orochimaaru wrote: post #61
falcor84 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no surprise that Rust is faster to run, but I don't think there are many who would claim that Rust is faster to write .

Maybe with LLM/Code Assistance this effort reduces? Since we're mostly talking mathematics here, you have well defined algorithms that don't need to be "vibed". The codegen, hopefully, is consistent.

I actually started this comment thread, and I just "wrote" two things using Opus 4.6 in Rust:

https://panel-panic.com https://larsdu.github.io/Dippy6502/

The issue is... I barely know the language. There are vast gaps in my knowledge (e.g. lifetimes, lifetime elison, dynamic dispatch, Box, Ref, Arc, all that)

Nor do I know much of anything about the 6502 microprocessor. I know even less from having the LLM one shot most of the project rather than grinding through it myself.

So in the age of AI, the question of how easy it is to write with a language may be less important than the question of how we should go about reading code.

Quite honestly, I don't really know why I wouldn't use Rust for a wide variety of projects with AI other than the compile/iteration time for larger projects. The compiler and static typing provide tremendously useful feedback and guardrails for LLM based programming. The use of structs and traits rather than OOP prevent a lot of long term architectural disasters by design. Deployment on the web can be done with WASM. Performance is out-of-the-box?

Writing Rust by hand though? I'm still terrible at it.

Re: Python: The Optimization Ladder

#114

Post by LarsDu88 »

scuff3d wrote: post #111
LarsDu88 wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an AI engineer I kinda wish the community had landed on Go or something in the early days. C# would also be great, although it tends to be pretty verbose. Python just has too strong network effects. In the early days it was between python and lua (anyone remember torchlua?). GoLang was very much still getting traction and in development. Theres also the strong association of golang to google, c# to microsoft, and…

Yeah that bothers me too, but it's damn hard to get away from these days. Most language projects have significant corporate involvement one way or the other. Go is criminally underrated in my opinion. It ticks so many boxes I'm surprised it hasn't seen more adoption.

It ticks many boxes for me on the surface, but I've read a few articles that critique some of its design choices.

Rust really ticks the "it got all the design choices right" boxes, but fighting the borrow checker and understand smart pointers, lifetimes, and dispatch can be a serious cognitive handicap for me.

Re: Python: The Optimization Ladder

#116

Post by retsibsi »

huseyinkeles wrote: post #27
repple wrote: post #20

Significant AI smell in this write up. As a result, my current reflex is to immediately stop reading. Not judgement on the actual analysis and human effort which went in. It’s just that the other context is missing.

The author is from Turkey (where I’m also originally from). Believe it or not, when you write a blog post in a different language, it really helps to use an LLM, even just to fix your grammar mistakes etc. I assume that’s most likely what happened here too.

I do believe it, but for whatever it's worth (maybe not much!):

If the author is willing and able to write understandable English, I'd prefer to read their version (even if it's very imperfect) than the LLM-polished version.

Alternatively, I'll happily read an article that was written in the author's native language and then translated directly to English.

This one bothered me because it's pretty clearly neither of those things, and so it reads just like any other LLM-written/LLM-polished piece.

[edit: just realised 'willing and able' might sound snarky in some way! All I meant was to acknowledge that even if you can write in a second (or third, etc.) language, you might not want to]

Re: Python: The Optimization Ladder

#117

Post by cycomanic »

repple wrote: post #20

Significant AI smell in this write up. As a result, my current reflex is to immediately stop reading. Not judgement on the actual analysis and human effort which went in. It’s just that the other context is missing.

What is the point of your post? I find it increasingly tedious to read comments about alledged AI use under almost every post. It's like complaining that you didn't want to read the submission because you didn't like their font or website design.

I think almost everyone here agrees they don't want to read AI slop, but this submission clearly wasn't that as you admit yourself.

Re: Python: The Optimization Ladder

#118

Post by 0xpgm »

gcanyon wrote: post #107

People here on HN have in the past suggested that TypeScript is the superior-in-all-ways, just-as-easy/fun-to-code-in language and should replace Python in pretty much all use cases. Anyone have an opinion on how TS would fare in this comparison?

As a mostly Python programmer and partly TypeScript programmer, my subjective thought is that a bit more 'noise' with TypeScript than Python.

Just a little more to parse with my eyes and a little more to type with TypeScript.

But hey, with all these cool kids with their AI coding agents, reading and handwriting code may soon be obsolete!

Re: Python: The Optimization Ladder

#120

Post by blitzar »

Trickery5837 wrote: post #119

It's missing the easiest of the choices: core performance-sensitive code in C, interface it to python with pybind11, build app in python. Small stack, huge gains, best of both worlds.

It's missing the easiest of the choices: grab a coffee and come back when it has run.
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