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What's the best programming language for coding agents?
131–140 of 205 posts
Re: What's the best programming language for coding agents?
#132Clojure's performance improves dramatically with an MCP REPL server. Part of that improvement is that the LLM gets parens balancing for free.
Re: What's the best programming language for coding agents?
#133Earlier 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…
And those batteries will soon include the very benchmark in this article. There'll be no need to build a zstd decoder, .NET will ship one in dotnet 11: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/api/system.io.compr...
Another slept-on feature is the ability to quickly write your own static analyzers, which along with the myriad of existing analyzers out there, provide excellent guard-rails to prevent slop.
Re: What's the best programming language for coding agents?
#134Earlier 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. 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 part…
Yea exactly. The article says there's too much noise to make any conclusion. You made a conclusion that there was a strong signal. Those things are opposites.
Re: What's the best programming language for coding agents?
#135Earlier quoted context omitted.
What is output quality without correctness? That seems like a distinction without a difference. Is the claim that LLMs produce Go code that is superficially nice looking but in fact fail to solve the stated problem? Because that's an anti-Go position I'd say.
Correctness is binary, while quality is not. Correctness is a suitable property to act as a multiplier in your formula, where incorrect is 0 and correct is 1, but you also need other facets to find a quality gradient.
In this context it's not binary. Context is everything. If it was binary there would only be 0 and 1 on one of the axis in the graph. That's not the case.
Re: What's the best programming language for coding agents?
#136Related: Which programming languages are most token-efficient? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46582728 - Jan 2026 (91 comments)
This area moves so fast is something from over 6 months ago still relevant?
Fable and Opus 5 have been released since then along with the corresponding OpenAI models.
Re: What's the best programming language for coding agents?
#137I'm not sure I trust a source that says "just 70 tokens average, nearly half of Clojure (109 tokens)". There's no reason to add the phrase "nearly half of", and there's especially no reason to add it when it's significantly far away from half. But on the main topic, I still feel that Go is an excellent choice for LLMs. There is pretty much just one way of doing most things, and the available training data is pretty c…
I’ve gone down the same logical pattern of using Go for llms even though I personally prefer Clojure.
Re: What's the best programming language for coding agents?
#138I'm not sure I trust a source that says "just 70 tokens average, nearly half of Clojure (109 tokens)". There's no reason to add the phrase "nearly half of", and there's especially no reason to add it when it's significantly far away from half. But on the main topic, I still feel that Go is an excellent choice for LLMs. There is pretty much just one way of doing most things, and the available training data is pretty c…
Professionally, Scala was always my favorite language to work in and I was lucky to get to use it most of my career. It is, however, probably the worst language I’ve experienced using with LLMs. Next worst is any dynamic language: it’s just so hard to not introduce strange bugs after iterating on a large-ish project across multiple agent sessions.
I’ve had good enough experiences with Rust, but actually OCaml has been hands down the language I’ve seen best results with. The quality (and performance) of code is just phenomenal — and the main issue when working as a solo human with the language, namely smaller pool of community libraries, just isn’t an issue any more. Jane Street has really done tremendous work modernizing the language and tooling.
Re: What's the best programming language for coding agents?
#139I'm surprised there is no breakdown of "with skills" (framework) and without. In my experience, apart from human readability, the ability of a model to follow strict skill rules is the important. For example I see a lot less waste of tokens and reasoning retry loops of obvious errors when using Python with uv+ruff than without.
Re: What's the best programming language for coding agents?
#140A while ago I benchmarked different tokenizers with a few common C++ coding styles. Depending on the combination I was able to reduce the token usage by as much as 5% just by auto formatting the codebase with clang-format.
Of course, this doesn't necessarily mean that a coding agent would perform better, but it was a fun experiment.