Contrary to what most comments seem to indicate, my takeaway from this is that it doesn't really matter all that much for the agents what language you pick. If humans are still to be involved in the process at some point, then its imperative that the language can be read by them, so the preference or skills of the developer(s) are of primary concern, not the agent.
What's the best programming language for coding agents?
121–130 of 205 posts
Re: What's the best programming language for coding agents?
#122[flagged]
Re: What's the best programming language for coding agents?
#123In my experience, Dart/Flutter has been so much better than React. Go has been really good for the backend. Basically if the framework/language gives you structure and one way to do things, agents tend to create less mess with less guardrails from you.
Re: What's the best programming language for coding agents?
#124Earlier quoted context omitted.
Go is absolutely one of the best programming languages for LLMs for the reason you say, and Python is just what LLMs like to use to write short throwaway scripts. Frontier LLMs are generally pretty good at most programming languages and can pick up new ones pretty quickly. Training data seems to mostly just increase the speed which they write code, for example, GPTs tend to write Rust and Python faster than other pro…
I think a lot of people are sleeping on the advantages of "batteries included" ecosystems. The need to select an appropriate 3rd party library represents an entire dimension of the search space that can be eliminated. Imagine having to make this choice multiple times per day when your competition is just mindlessly using System.* types. The fact that the .NET ecosystem is curated by one entity should not be underesti…
Reflection is good for prototyping and get something setup quickly, but if you build your architecture around it, not only do you lose access to NativeAOT, the code becomes very hard to debug, and if you code with LLM a lot, you either have to spend time trying to debug reflections or just rewrite it with source generation to begin with, which is at least honest about the metaprogramming there.
Reflection is just such a dangerous feature that looks like ordinary code, which is why it is something to be avoided, and having an LLM write/analyze the code for eliminates the need to use a lot of reflective code to begin with.
Re: What's the best programming language for coding agents?
#125I wonder if there's correlations between tasks and languages, e.g. maybe R is better for bioinformatics tasks, python for webdev, C for CLIs, etc. I'd expect to see it because some languages are used more often in some tasks than others, but on the other hand LLMs can learn across languages and it's not clear if task-language use patterns are just historical or if the language is genuinely better at the task.
Re: What's the best programming language for coding agents?
#126I don't care so much about token efficiency and cost, within reason. I care about whether the quality of the code is maintainable over time and through many iterations. My gut feeling is that very strict languages with good types, a standardized style, and very strong static analysis tools, is what helps make that happen. Of course it also has to be well-represented in the training data.
That leaves Go, Rust, Python with type annotations, and Typescript. And, I choose them in roughly that order unless there's a reason to choose otherwise. Rapid iterations on scripty tasks get Python. Most CLI, system services, and web apps are Go. Desktop apps and games are Rust. Typescript if I don't have a choice (i.e. it runs in a browser).
Re: What's the best programming language for coding agents?
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
> This is very different from Python, where training data is polluted (I presume) with tons of code written by non-software engineers and demonstrating many different ways of doing the same thing. Python's philosophy is there is one way to do it, as opposed to Perl's TIMTOWTDI. Your statement also assumes that 'software engineers' write the best code, and from my experience, this is definitely not true I believe the…
But that's the trouble, Python has the slogan about only one way, but it's really not true in practice. Or maybe there's the one way that "should" be done, and then the half dozen other ways you'll encounter in the wild, as gp alluded.
Python is the language where in practice this is most untrue - maybe outside C++.
As an example, there are dicts, tuples, classes, NamedTuples, dataclasses, attr.s, Pydantic, and pretty much all of those solve similar problem (hold my data) but have slightly different properties and use cases.
Re: What's the best programming language for coding agents?
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
Go is absolutely one of the best programming languages for LLMs for the reason you say, and Python is just what LLMs like to use to write short throwaway scripts. Frontier LLMs are generally pretty good at most programming languages and can pick up new ones pretty quickly. Training data seems to mostly just increase the speed which they write code, for example, GPTs tend to write Rust and Python faster than other pro…
> Go is absolutely one of the best programming languages for LLMs for the reason you say, and Python is just what LLMs like to use to write short throwaway scripts. And yet this article has pretty strong empirical data to show that your intuition here is incorrect. You should back up your statement with something more than vibes.
If you actually read the data, especially the distribution graph in the last image, the conclusion that it draws is "the run-to-run distribution variance is so big that there doesn't seem to be a correlation that can be drawn from this experiment", pretty much every language has similar-ish distribution ranging from ~20 to 34, and Clojure is only the worst because GPT has a tendency to write code that contains a particular byte manipulation mistake that it repeatedly makes, not that GPT is bad at Clojure or anything.
My experiences are of course anecdotal, but if you have some other strong empirical data to show, I'd love to see it.
Re: What's the best programming language for coding agents?
#129I 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.
HN’s favorite CS professor homepage webpage-style author is on top of the AIs but sticking with keeping out newfangled CSS. Nothing could tell us more about clanker inevitability.
Re: What's the best programming language for coding agents?
#130Earlier quoted context omitted.
> This is very different from Python, where training data is polluted (I presume) with tons of code written by non-software engineers and demonstrating many different ways of doing the same thing. Python's philosophy is there is one way to do it, as opposed to Perl's TIMTOWTDI. Your statement also assumes that 'software engineers' write the best code, and from my experience, this is definitely not true I believe the…
But that's the trouble, Python has the slogan about only one way, but it's really not true in practice. Or maybe there's the one way that "should" be done, and then the half dozen other ways you'll encounter in the wild, as gp alluded.
the slogan came out when the alternative was Perl, and in Perl you could do the same thing in a million ways, and each of them was equally "idiomatic".
> There should be one-- and preferably only one --obvious way to do it. [1]
Note the `should` and the `obvious`. Is it not a strict rule about having a single way to do things. It is about the aspiration that, if you do something, there is single obvious way to do it, much better than the others.
(I agree though that not even this is true anymore, see how many different ways you have to interpolate strings).