> Go and ... strong type systems
Lol good meme
If AI writes your code, why use Python?
411–420 of 1001 posts
Re: If AI writes your code, why use Python?
#412For now it’s the exact same reason why you’d use Python when you’re writing by hand: so the code is more easily readable/editable by humans who are more likely to know Python than something like Zig. But I understand the point the post is trying to make, I don’t think we’re there yet.
The world where automation writes in a language no human understands reminds me of the completely pitch black Chinese automation factories, where humans are lost and confused but robots at home
Everyone is trying to figure out how and what are the optimal use cases. It could be like you said but it doesn’t have to be. There’s a lot of incentive for it not to end up like that.
Re: If AI writes your code, why use Python?
#413Earlier 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’m super surprised that C++ scores so high, this does not match our experience at all, and for anything performance critical it always drops the ball completely. I also don’t understand how these “games” map to real world complex problems. How are you measuring success? How does “adversarial customer service” map to “this LLM is better at C++ than the other” ? How are you sure you’re not just benchmarking language s…
- The majority of the environments can be played where the agent writes code to work the environment towards a goal. So the model is problem solving, and it has to do so in a particular language, and some languages outperform others. We have a lot of data to back up the improved compiled language performance, but note these are for successful code submissions (failures are counted in a different metric). With the Languages chart we're moreso measuring how good the ideas they came up with were, once they already compiled/didn't fail basic environment rules.
- You need to run evals at scale to converge on this kind of behavior: these benchmarks run samples across a pool of hundreds of different types of environments
- Some games are too open-ended to support code play. The customer service game is an example of that, where models are called on every tick of the environment to make a decision (that's the 'decision making' part of the evals which is weighted lowest). Very interesting results but not testing coding ability, just general reasoning.
Not sure what issues you have with models writing C++ vs other languages, but I can imagine all sorts of C++ specific bottlenecks not directly related to the model's ability to reason in the language, like the dependencies, verbosity, extra effort to manage memory, etc. I have only done a little C/embedded work since agentic coding happened but I was pleasantly surprised.
Re: If AI writes your code, why use Python?
#414Read 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 had an itch to give Perl another go after a 5 year hiatus. I wanted a super simple way to spawn a proxy I was building in Go, along with writing various integration tests. I used Claude Code to write the bulk of it and found Claude to be remarkable good at Perl. I told Claude to only use what’s built into Perl’s standard library rather than reaching for anything in CPAN. Turns out everything from HTTP clients, TLS…
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Re: If AI writes your code, why use Python?
#415Kind of my fear is that the industry and dev community will ignore new frameworks, languages, architectures etc because the LLM aren't trained on those new things. For example low level converging to Rust, web frontends to something like React etc.
Arguably, we've focused way too much on new frameworks, languages and architectures for a while.
Re: If AI writes your code, why use Python?
#416Earlier quoted context omitted.
The LLMs are generally still pretty bad at (deductive) reasoning. IME they go along more with the things like variable names and comments than the actual program logic (it would be an interesting experiment to compare LLM's understanding of three identical programs with different identifiers, one with normal identifiers, one with obfuscated identifiers, and one with deliberately misleading identifiers). I also think…
wait till you look inside a neural network and realize they're incapable of deductive reasoning! amazing how many devs that talk about "AI" would probably have a hard time telling apart deductive and inductive reasoning.
How so?
Re: If AI writes your code, why use Python?
#417Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think that’s sort of the selling point no? It’s really boring. It has like -10 keywords, compiles insanely fast, and has a concurrency model that’s easy to use and read. LLMs are great at using Go tooling to sanity check along the way. It’s easy to write shitty Go but it’s really pleasant to work with if you find those things compelling.
don't you worry about garbage collection?
What's the big issue with GC nowadays? It has mattered to me exactly once in decades and it was still manageable anyway by using a more low level style in a hot loop. I see very few usecases where GC actually matters and for those rare few cases it was not like you were using python beforehand anyway
Re: If AI writes your code, why use Python?
#418[flagged]
Re: If AI writes your code, why use Python?
#419This is a fairly crap post and the reasoning isn't sound but somehow the conclusion is still somewhat correct.
You do want to use Rust with LLMs.
The reason you want it is simple, it's more constrained.
LLMs thrive on constraint and drown in freedom.
The further you can constraint the solution space the more likely you are to end up with a solution you like/is actually good.
Rust has several properties that make it really good for LLMs:
* Really robust type system that is also very expressive, if guided LLMs can implement most of the invariants in types which substantially increases the chances of success.
* Great compile time errors, the specificity and brevity (vs say C++ template expansion) means token efficient correction of syntax and/or borrow mistakes etc.
* Protection against subtle errors at compile time, namely data races and memory safety issues.
* Great corpus of well designed code and patterns, higher quality on average than some other ecosystems more favored by begineers/mass-market programming.
* Stdlib is strong, small-ish number of blessed crates.
* Context friendly, type signatures, errors, etc are all dense information.
* Also bias towards compile time checks means less runtime tests which means less toolcall time (and less tests needed overall) which in turn makes the process a ton faster.
I have been continually using Rust, Python and Kotlin since ~Jan this year and keeping track of my thoughts and I increasingly bias towards Rust now where I would have previously chosen Python or Kotlin instead just because I am lazy and I prefer the tool that the computer writes better so I have to write less lol.
Re: If AI writes your code, why use Python?
#420Read 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
My feeling is that for agentic tasks this is not only language design but also LSPs, error messages and static analysis capabilities that dominate the benchmarks. It would IMHO be interesting to look into better subsets of python and style/rewrite techniques as well as alternative linter and their effects on performance.