I use Claude Code daily to work on a large Python codebase and I'm yet to see the it hallucinating a variable or method (I always ask it to write and run unit tests, so that may be helping). Anyway, I don't think that's a problem at all, most problems I face with AI-generated code are not solved by a borrow-checker or a compiler: bad architecture, lack of forward-thinking, hallucinations in the contract of external API calls, etc.
Any application that can be written in a system language, eventually will be
51–60 of 132 posts
Re: Any application that can be written in a system language, eventually will be
#52I'm surprised the author of this article thinks Go is a "system language".
Go uses GC, and therefore can't be used for hard real time applications. That's disqualifying as I understand it.
C, C++, Rust, Ada, and Mojo are true system languages IMO. It is true that as long as you can pre-allocate your data structures, and disable GC at runtime, that GC-enabled languages can be used. However, many of them rely on GC in their standard libraries.
Re: Any application that can be written in a system language, eventually will be
#53It might be the opposite. Python apps still get written despite the performance hit, because understandability matters more than raw performance in many cases. Now that we’re all code reviewers, that quality should matter more, not less. Programmer time is still more expensive than machine time in many cases.
I'd much more prefer to review something written in Rust or Go, even if I'd much rather write it in Python if I had to do it manually.
The better structure and clear typing makes the review much easier.
Re: Any application that can be written in a system language, eventually will be
#54Why stop at a systems language? Why not assembly? Hell why not raw machine code?
You have to rewrite it for every new processor? Big deal. Llm magic means that cost isn't an issue and a rewrite is just changing a single variable in the docs.
Re: Any application that can be written in a system language, eventually will be
#55oh no, not this again.
There's a joke I forgot its name, something goes like
- high performance language but hard-coded
- xml/yaml configs
- dynamic configs and codegen
- metaprogramming or DSL, or just lua or python
- let's static type to speed things up and use a compiler
- high performance language but hard-coded
Re: Any application that can be written in a system language, eventually will be
#56It might be the opposite. Python apps still get written despite the performance hit, because understandability matters more than raw performance in many cases. Now that we’re all code reviewers, that quality should matter more, not less. Programmer time is still more expensive than machine time in many cases.
I've cooled significantly on Python now that there are a number of strongly typed languages out there that have also gotten rid of the boilerplate of languages Python used to compete with.
Readability gets destroyed when a function can accept 3 different types, all named the same thing, with magic strings acting as enums, and you just have to hope all the cases are well documented.
Re: Any application that can be written in a system language, eventually will be
#57I kinda like viewing this as similar to coordinate-invariance in physics / geometry. A programming language is effectively a function from textual programs to behaviors; this serves the same role as a coordinate system on a space, which is a function from coordinates to points. Naturally many different programs and programming languages can describe the same behavior, especially if you forget about implementation-spe…
but the interesting thing about coordinate systems is that they do matter, a lot! many problems are much much easier to solve in one coordinate system than another.
no doubt, but... also physics advanced in leaps and bounds every time someone figured out that ways of abstracting out a coordinate system.
Re: Any application that can be written in a system language, eventually will be
#58It might be the opposite. Python apps still get written despite the performance hit, because understandability matters more than raw performance in many cases. Now that we’re all code reviewers, that quality should matter more, not less. Programmer time is still more expensive than machine time in many cases.
Are Python apps really so easy to understand? I seriously disagree with this idea given how much magic goes behind nearly every line of Python. Especially if you veer off the happy path. I certainly am no fan of C but from a certain point of view it’s much easier to understand what’s going on in C.
One of the (many) reasons that I moved away from Python was the whole "we can do it in 3 lines"
Oh cool someone has imported a library that does a shedload of really complicated magic that nobody in the shop understands - that's going to go well.
We're (The Software Engineering community as a whole) are also seeing something similar to this with AI generated code, there's screeds of code going into a codebase that nobody understands is full across (give a reviewer a 5 line PR and they will find 14 things to change, give them a 500 line PR and LGTM is all you will see).
Re: Any application that can be written in a system language, eventually will be
#59It might be the opposite. Python apps still get written despite the performance hit, because understandability matters more than raw performance in many cases. Now that we’re all code reviewers, that quality should matter more, not less. Programmer time is still more expensive than machine time in many cases.
I'd much more prefer to review something written in Rust or Go, even if I'd much rather write it in Python if I had to do it manually. The better structure and clear typing makes the review much easier.
My biggest reason for liking Go, over Python can be summed up in one word: Discipline.
Python was supposed to be embracing the idea of "there's only one way to do it", which appeals after Perl's "There's many ways to do it", but the reality is, there's 100 ways to do it, and they're all shocking.
Re: Any application that can be written in a system language, eventually will be
#60I was expecting an insightful analysis of systems languages versus dynamically typed interpreted languages,
but instead I got more sloperator hype.