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

If AI writes your code, why use Python?

medium.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

281–290 of 1001 posts

Re: If AI writes your code, why use Python?

#281

Post by spongebobstoes »

Alejandro2026 wrote: post #212
mountainriver wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why? Go has a GC, is basically incompatible with C and very limited overall

Go's limited syntax is actually a feature here,because it stops the LLM from trying to be too clever

LLMs use `any` types, `recover`, `init`, and other weird warts of golang

rust is a better language in every way for LLMs: more precise typing, better compiler errors, fewer performance footguns, no race conditions, clear interface definitions and implementations

golang is easier for humans to quickly get productive, but the language is lacking in helpful features for an LLM

Re: If AI writes your code, why use Python?

#282

Post by impulser_ »

_boffin_ wrote: post #80

Read the first few comments and surprised I didn’t see it, but training data. The voluminous amount of Python in the training data. I could write in brainfuck with ai, but I presume, wouldn’t get the same results than if going with python. My follow up question: with AI now, why care about a lang until you need to?

People really need to stop assuming more training data the better. This is not how it works. LLM thrive off consistency.

Go for example has significantly less training data than Python, but LLMs are the best at it. Why? Go is often written the same. You go from project to project and the code looks all the same. There only a very few ways to write Go.

Re: If AI writes your code, why use Python?

#283

Post by gertlabs »

isityettime wrote: post #237
gertlabs wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Surprisingly, LLMs are actually much worse at reasoning in Python than other common programming languages for agentic coding tasks. Data here: https://gertlabs.com/rankings?mode=agentic_coding

I would love to see how they do with functional languages and especially Lisps here. I've noticed pretty good performance with Emacs Lisp relative to overall model strength, but I haven't used LLMs to application code in any such languages. It would also be interesting to see how Python compares to other languages in its niche (Ruby, Perl, Raku). Thanks for putting this together! It's interesting.

That's a good idea. Would you rather see Lisp or Scala? Any interest in Prolog? We are trying to be selective to keep the data concentrated, but we will eventually add a couple more, most likely to sample different programming paradigms.

Re: If AI writes your code, why use Python?

#285

Post by arjie »

Actually, I do use compiled languages for this reason. Even Opus 4.7 and GPT-5.5 will leave unassigned variables lying around in Python code of sufficient size. If you've got sufficient testing you'll exercise all paths, and I imagine a good prompt would ensure adding testing with coverage to see that it does happen. However, I do not have (yet) such a system but using Go/Rust helps a lot because the compile phase actually helps detect correctness issues.

My other problem with most of the other ecosystems: ts/npm, python/uv, rust/cargo is that they all have build-time scripts that are controlled by others that execute automatically. This is a real problem because the LLM will just install things and proceed to send your home directory through a juicer. I feel a bit of a paranoiac now doing this, but I have a script that launches a podman container with just the source directory and a binary directory loaded (for caching) which compiles everything.

I know there's some sequence of steps I can take to protect myself, but if the LLM accidentally uses pnpm to run dev build scripts when I had the right config on npm or whatever, I know I'm screwed. So now I do all these shenanigans with Rust (to the extent that I vendor old deps sometimes). So the ideal language to me now is one with very few of these footguns and sandtraps which has a tight iteration loop.

Re: If AI writes your code, why use Python?

#287

Post by zuminator »

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #180
_boffin_ wrote: post #80

Read the first few comments and surprised I didn’t see it, but training data. The voluminous amount of Python in the training data. I could write in brainfuck with ai, but I presume, wouldn’t get the same results than if going with python. My follow up question: with AI now, why care about a lang until you need to?

I built a programming language, and LLMs can code phenomenally well in it. I don't think the training set matters that much, since there's no way they have my language in their training set! Programming languages have a lot in common. Python is kind of odd when it comes to languages.

If the training data is basically irrelevant, then an LLM should be able to iteratively improve the programming language it uses, resulting in a custom language optimally designed to maximize its own coding ability. The source code might not even be human readable natively, just translated into pseudocode on an as-needed basis.

Re: If AI writes your code, why use Python?

#288

Post by tjwebbnorfolk »

throwawayk7h wrote: post #231
GavinAnderegg wrote: post #211

It's strange to me that this blog post was written in English. If AI is available, why aren't we all communicating in Lojban? [0] It's an obviously superior language. What does it matter that many people already communicate in English and much of computing depends on that language? AI doesn't care about that. Plus, if you ever need to edit Lojban without AI, you should be able to pick it up in a few weeks, right? [0]…

AI has not been trained on Lojban. And furthermore, this article is almost certainly primarily intended to be read by humans directly. I understand you're being facetious, but I'm not sure what point you're trying to make about programming languages in comparison.

Python is intended to be read by humans also. Since I am a human and I want to be able to read and review the code in my project, I therefore have AI write in Python as well.

Re: If AI writes your code, why use Python?

#289

Post by Tarq0n »

ambicapter wrote: post #132
not2b wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That would matter if we were asking the AI to generate code open-loop: someone probably already wrote something close to what you asked for in Python. But if the agent generates code, tries to compile it, sees the detailed error messages and acts on those messages to refine the code, it's going to produce a higher quality result. rustc produces really good diagnostics. And there's a lot of Rust code online now, even…

LLMs don't actually semantically parse the error messages. They will generate the most likely sequence resulting from the error message based on their training data, so you're back to the training data argument.

Of course they do, error messages get tokenized and put into the context window just like anything else. This isn't a Markov chain.

Re: If AI writes your code, why use Python?

#290

Post by goodmattg »

gertlabs wrote: post #174
_boffin_ wrote: post #80

Read the first few comments and surprised I didn’t see it, but training data. The voluminous amount of Python in the training data. I could write in brainfuck with ai, but I presume, wouldn’t get the same results than if going with python. My follow up question: with AI now, why care about a lang until you need to?

Surprisingly, LLMs are actually much worse at reasoning in Python than other common programming languages for agentic coding tasks. Data here: https://gertlabs.com/rankings?mode=agentic_coding

[dead]
Post reply on HN