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If AI writes your code, why use Python?

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

#311

Post by FireBeyond »

BariumBlue wrote: post #210
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

Hah, I was just thinking that Python likely has a vast ocean of training data, but it's likely of lower quality, being much of it is written by beginners and those who aren't primarily programmers.

All my vibe coded projects (personal) are Go backend services, with Typescript/React frontend. And my thoughts were based on similar things. Like why I wouldn't use PHP for that, either.

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

#312

Post by thefounder »

stevefan1999 wrote: post #308

Really controversial but my honest opinion: That's because programming languages, and its natural language counterpart, too, are nowadays increasing and more likely in becoming a political tool, rather than itself being a tech tool. I observed this through observation of the attacks to Rust due to the huge presence of LGBT people. Now while I'm pretty much straight myself, I don't reject LGBT people and don't want to…

Why we have discussions about sexual orientation on programming languages? Could this really go any worse?

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

#313

Post by skeledrew »

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.

> AI has not been trained on Lojban

I took the challenge and asked Perplexity. I have no idea how much of it is correct, if any, but I think the result[0] is pretty interesting anyway, especially compared to Esperanto [1].

[0] https://www.perplexity.ai/search/8315bbb6-fa32-40f3-8b2b-c6c...

[1] https://www.perplexity.ai/search/9c3839ba-1d68-4be9-afd1-4ef...

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

#314

Post by aesthesia »

sirnicolaz wrote: post #303

Because the SWE benchmarks for LLM coding are done on python code bases, hence you are likely gonna have superior results

Yeah, this is a big part of it. Labs have been hill climbing on Python for years, plus AI devs are usually most familiar with Python anyways.

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

#315

Post by irjustin »

3uler wrote: post #299
parsimo2010 wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s funny that in your reply “this article is almost certainly intended to be read by humans” you made what is the best case to keep writing code in Python even with AI. Sure, if you are going to have an AI do all your coding and maintenance you can use whatever language it’s best at. But if you want to participate in the writing, debugging, and maintenance, it has to be in a language that a human can read. I’m not…

I’ve always found Ruby to be way more readable, what keeps me using python is the depth of libraries is unmatched. So unless you’re into burning tokens having AI generate untested libraries, I’d stick to using the most idiomatic tool for the problem you are tackling.

So, it's really interesting. We've started moving away from python libs because 25% OSS is out of date and another % is custom tweaks to the software help our use cases. In both scenarios it means our own fork.

And honestly it's not burning that many tokens if you've got an existing example lib to point to.

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

#316

Post by ElFitz »

> You used Python or TypeScript because[…]. because Rust, Go, C++, and many more would give you 10–100x the performance, but you paid for it: […] a build system that fought you.

I would argue I spent more time fighting the TypeScript build system than Rust’s.

But up until recently I only used either just often enough to never remember what magic configuration needed to go in my tsconfig.json and package.json to get TypeScript to work.

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

#317

Post by thefounder »

So he includes Go in a list of languages that apparently makes development slow and have “a build system that fought you” and then says python was the solution for all that. I think he got it backwards. I have found the Python build system horrific and broken by default while Go just works.

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

#318

Post by tabbott »

I think the author misunderstands what is good about Python.

One of the big strengths of Python is legibility: most developers find it easy to read and understand.

If you are planning to have humans verify the code you're using in production, to confirm it implements your intent, the readability of the code you are producing is important.

Performance is valuable, but for a lot of code, performance is less important than correctness and ease of verifying it.

If you are imagining your codebase being one where nobody but Claude reads the code, you might as well do Rust for the better performance. But I don't think a lot of organizations are doing that.

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

#319

Post by pier25 »

CharlieDigital wrote: post #263
sshine wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I almost always pick Rust. Recently I wrote a plugin for something that was written in Go. I could have used Rust, but Go for one felt right because if the thing turned out well, others would surely find more value in having one toolchain. The main reason is that you’re capable of reading it if you need to. And the recipient ecosystem expects a language. That’s why some data science communities pick R, MatLab, Julia,…

C# feels kinda nice because it's a good balance. Very good static typing, Roslyn analyzers, good tooling and decent hot reload (for a compiled language), really good ORM (EF Core) that implements UoW and reduces a lot of the need for transaction management (simplifying the code), flexible enough and fast enough for various kinds of use cases. Source generators are underrated as well since they can make the code very…

Yeah C# is fantastic. I also love EF.

I stopped using it because overall it feels like Microsoft has lost the plot with .NET.

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

#320

Post by shevy-java »

> The strongest argument for Python and JavaScript was never the languages themselves. It was the ecosystems

That's already a glaring mistake. People could say perl's CPAN is great. Well, it did not save perl from declining in the last 20 years.

> The Python ecosystem is increasingly a Rust ecosystem wearing a Python hat.

Without statistics to prove this, this claim is useless.

Also, depending on Rust isn't that strange if a language is based on ... C. The only way I would disagree with such an argument were if Python were written in Python. But since it is syntactic sugar over C - just like ruby or perl are too - the argument to use Rust here is simply not different to using C. Perhaps Rust is better than C, but it is not fundamentally different. Whether Python were written in Rust or C is not a functional difference here.

As for AI becoming our new Overlord: I honestly do not want to depend on US mega-corporations. I am not disputing the fact that AI has objective use cases. I am objecting this herd mentality of everyone putting an AI chip into their brain now.

Damn AI slop zombies everywhere - it's like in the old B movie "They Live". But with less entertainment value than that. If they chew bubblegum then it is to slop up everything, not to kick ass.

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