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

571–580 of 1001 posts

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

#571

Post by ashishb »

kurtis_reed wrote: post #554
ashishb wrote: post #544

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Python is amazing for scripting. Python is terrible for writing big systems. Projects whose V1 is written in Go/Rust/C++ don't normally go out and re-write V2 in Python. The reverse is really common. Even many famous Python packages are now Python wrappers. https://ashishb.net/programming/python-in-production/

Python is faster to write so obviously you'll see things built in Python first more often than the reverse. What's that quote -- "Better to remain silent and be thought a fool..."

Indeed. Python is faster to write and harder to maintain over the long run.

The "faster to write" advantage becomes less relevant if most code is going to be auto-generated.

The "harder to maintain" might still remain more relevant.

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

#572

Post by coldtea »

walthamstow wrote: post #557
coldtea wrote: post #458

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Go has a huge stable standard library no other language even comes close to Well, Java and Python do.

Yet the first thing most people do before making a HTTP request is pip install requests

Yet, a nicer request wrapper is not the be all end all of batteries, and Python covers a huge spread of libs

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

#573

Post by fennecfoxy »

fennecfoxy wrote: post #551
bryanrasmussen wrote: post #453

One obvious reason is Python's extreme readability, it has often been described as being as close to executable pseudo-code as one can get. If you're using an LLM to write code I think the rules would be 1. Use a language you know really well so you can read it easily, and add to it as needed. 2. Use a language that has a large training set so the LLM can be most efficient. 3. Use a language that is easy to read. If…

I think that pseudocode aspect is what makes it hard/frustrating to read for me. I'm more of a c++/TS/etc user, so I miss braces a lot. I think a basic Python script sure it's easy to read through, but a large project starts to get quite ugh. I am very jealous of Python's numerous built-ins though. I was looking for a JS sum function the other day and was surprised to see node.js still doesn't have a built in + you s…

Lmao are people really -ing me because I don't like Python. Tribalism is present in all areas of human life I suppose.

You people should grow up. Programming languages are tools, not pets.

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

#574

Post by LukaD »

bryanrasmussen wrote: post #453

One obvious reason is Python's extreme readability, it has often been described as being as close to executable pseudo-code as one can get. If you're using an LLM to write code I think the rules would be 1. Use a language you know really well so you can read it easily, and add to it as needed. 2. Use a language that has a large training set so the LLM can be most efficient. 3. Use a language that is easy to read. If…

> 2. Use a language that has a large training set so the LLM can be most efficient.

I seriously doubt this is really the case. From my experience coding agents just love writing bad python code. It always needs explicit instructions for example to use uv instead of raw dogging pip. There is a lot of python code out there because it is being taught as a beginner language and because of that there is necessarily a lot python code written by beginners. That's my explanation at least for bad LLM generated python code.

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

#575

Post by munksbeer »

sgt wrote: post #549
munksbeer wrote: post #507

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Disclaimer: I love writing production systems in Java. I was a C++ programmer for 10 years before moving to Java about 15 years ago. Java offers a virtually all in one package when writing large systems. You have a single language where you can write code that doesn't care to be the fastest possible, and you just rely on ZGC to do its thing, and it works. Or you can write GC free code with a mostly quite performant S…

Would be interesting to find out what kind of production systems you write in Java and how you deploy / scale them. What DB backends you use, caching, etc. And whether you're also on Spring.

Always finance, trading systems. In the last 15 years mostly what they call "front office".

At the moment, for the place I work, we deploy on AWS mostly (because that is where our target trading venues often are). DB backends are largely not something we think about too much, because all of that is done out of band of course as a final state. Our main persistence is through our "bus" using aeron, and everything starts and recovers from there. This is not your typical enterprise java. No Spring.

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

#576

Post by theshrike79 »

bryanrasmussen wrote: post #453

One obvious reason is Python's extreme readability, it has often been described as being as close to executable pseudo-code as one can get. If you're using an LLM to write code I think the rules would be 1. Use a language you know really well so you can read it easily, and add to it as needed. 2. Use a language that has a large training set so the LLM can be most efficient. 3. Use a language that is easy to read. If…

My preferences are always Go first and Python if there are specific libraries that make my life easier.

Go is a simple target for LLMs as the language has changed very little and with the Jetbrains go-modern-guidelines[0] skill the LLM can use the handful of recent additions effectively

And with Python there are things like ruff and pydantic that can enforce contracts in the code.

[0] https://github.com/JetBrains/go-modern-guidelines

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

#577

Post by intelVISA »

hirvi74 wrote: post #171
bensyverson wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just use Go. LLMs have seen a ton of it, they write it well, it compiles practically instantly, and it has all the advantages of a typed compiled language. I created a big Python codebase using AI, and the LLM constantly guesses arguments or dictionary formats wrong. Unit tests and stuff like pydantic help, but it's better to avoid that whole class of runtime errors altogether.

But what is the selling point for Go? I get that it is allegedly hailed to be a simple language with basically no batteries included, but why is that a selling point? Does Go excel at anything no other language does?

I really don't like the lang itself but nobody will deny it has a very strong ecosystem and stdlib for handling around 95% of many well-solved problems you are likely to encounter.

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

#578

Post by kraf »

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.

That's what I'm thinking too. There is a lot of noise and I know teams where the majority of the people writing Python just have no idea what they're doing.

I'm working with Clojure which is used mostly by senior engineers and it still blows my mind how well Claude writes software in it even though it's a fringe language. It's even able to pick up in-house DSLs written with macros.

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

#579

Post by FartinMowler »

fennecfoxy wrote: post #551
bryanrasmussen wrote: post #453

One obvious reason is Python's extreme readability, it has often been described as being as close to executable pseudo-code as one can get. If you're using an LLM to write code I think the rules would be 1. Use a language you know really well so you can read it easily, and add to it as needed. 2. Use a language that has a large training set so the LLM can be most efficient. 3. Use a language that is easy to read. If…

I think that pseudocode aspect is what makes it hard/frustrating to read for me. I'm more of a c++/TS/etc user, so I miss braces a lot. I think a basic Python script sure it's easy to read through, but a large project starts to get quite ugh. I am very jealous of Python's numerous built-ins though. I was looking for a JS sum function the other day and was surprised to see node.js still doesn't have a built in + you s…

But at least JS now has a built-in leftpad function ;) (called padStart).

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

#580

Post by johncearls »

fragmede wrote: post #489
DaanDL wrote: post #479

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never really understood what exactly is so readable about python. I've been developing in Python for 8 years now, and before that I was a C# developer, and I don't find Python to be that more readable. Sure there's less ceremony, and yes, you can have your project going with just a single file, but other than that...?

The "other than that" is whitespace, not brackets. Whether that's a big deal is up to you, but the carry on effect of that is that the code is indented the way the control flow interprets it, so there are no bugs from misplaced braces. (Plenty of other bugs for other reasons, unfortunately.)

Whitespace forcing proper indentation practices has always been one of my favorite aspects of python. I TA'd a data structures in C++ class and the lack of proper indentation making code unreadable was my biggest pet peeve. I always made the student fix their indentation before I would help them debug it.

I know that is mainly a beginner coding issue, but never having to deal with that issue was always one of the biggest advantages of python.

That said, I believe a lot of the stuff that was added in 3 and beyond (to make it more typesafe, accounting for unicode, etc) has made it a lot less readable over time. You can argue that it has made Python a better and safer language, but the pseudocode aspect has gotten worse. I kinda miss that.

Post reply on HN