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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?

#591

Post by alkonaut »

Agreed. Even if Python or JS was the language I knew well, even if the platform ecosystem is the one I need, I'd _still_ make very sure to use at least strong types (even if not static) for anything an AI co-creates and is maintained longer term.

Rust isn't perfect due to rather long turnaround for compile/test iterations, but a lot of those can be avoided if the type checking is quicker than compilation. Rust is also more verbose than python and other very high level languages, which means your token budget is eaten more quickly as it works on a lower level.

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

#593

Post by mbreese »

sundarurfriend wrote: post #526
bazoom42 wrote: post #491

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For larger systems you create your own modules and abstractions, so comprehensibility at higher level does not depend so much on the language.

The tools the language gives you to create those abstractions make a lot of difference, however.

But every abstraction that an LLM has to write is a choice. Your way of writing Python may not match that choice. The next run of the agent might not choose the same way.

Because the language gives you many different tools, an LLM generated codebase can get inconsistent and overly complicated quickly. The flexibility of Python is a downside when you’re having an LLM generate the code. If you’re working in an existing codebase, it’s great - those choices were already made and it can match your style.

When an LLM has to derive its own style is when things can devolve into a jumbled mess.

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

#594

Post by pmontra »

zahlman wrote: post #539
strangegecko wrote: post #496

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find brackets help me understand structure from a distance much better than whitespace. Misplaced brackets seem like a thing from the past to me when we didn't have IDEs. I don't remember ever having a bug due to that.

> I find brackets help me understand structure from a distance much better than whitespace. I can't imagine how. Whitespace physically lays out the block structure on the screen; braces expect you to count and balance matching symbols, and possibly scan for them within other line noise.

Nevertheless it happens that while moving code around one wonders what indentation level that code should go. Undo, undo or git show the original code, look at it, retry more carefully.

Brackets would allow the editor to autoindent the pasted code.

No choice is perfect.

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

#595

Post by bob1029 »

Python might still be the best option if your goal is to perfectly one shot the solution and minimize token usage as much as possible.

However, if you are willing to stub your toes, retry, and pay more money, an entire new world opens up. Languages like python seem to fall apart faster in extremely large projects.

I've got a collection of interdependent .NET codebases with about 50 megs of raw source between them. Having C# be strongly typed seems like an essential backbone for keeping everything on rails in my agentic scenarios. The code edits have been flawless for several months now. I've got successful apply_patch usages that touch 20 files at a time. LLM code editing performance might be mostly language agnostic once we compensate for the strictness of the type system. More specifically, how much useful information is returned at compile time.

Compile time errors and warnings are probably the most powerful alignment mechanism available. Some ecosystems allow for you to specify your own classes of errors and warnings. I think tools like Roslyn Analyzers might be more powerful than unit tests in this application. Domain-specific compilation feedback feels like the holy grail to me.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/code-quality/...

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

#596

Post by smoe »

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.

Having used Python on and off for 20 years, my experience with LLMs writing Python has been mixed. I don’t think that’s necessarily because of a low-quality dataset, but rather because Python’s applications are so broad and the language has gone through several paradigm shifts over time: sync vs. async, typed vs. untyped, scientific Python looking very different from web application code, some people really wishing it were an FP language, and others doing the clean-architecture OOP onion soup. It has gotten so fragmented.

Recently, I had a more pleasant experience using LLMs with Go. It reminds me a bit of Python 2.x, when the community seemed, in my view, more focused on embracing a stupid simple language, with everyone trying to write roughly similar "Pythonic" code.

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

#597

Post by isityettime »

gertlabs wrote: post #283
isityettime wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think Clojure would probably make for a more interesting comparison because its syntax is more different from the other languages currently on there and it's less multi-paradigm than Scala is (it doesn't support OOP, it's more explicitly immutable-first). I think Scala is a lovely and cool language, but I'd be more interested in the Clojure comparison here.

Prolog night be interesting because I bet nobody is trying to train very hard on it, but I'm less directly interested in model performance with Prolog.

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

#598

Post by pmontra »

bazoom42 wrote: post #569
strangegecko wrote: post #496

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find brackets help me understand structure from a distance much better than whitespace. Misplaced brackets seem like a thing from the past to me when we didn't have IDEs. I don't remember ever having a bug due to that.

So you would find bracketed code without any use of indentation easier to read than python?

It's no more 1990, when Python was born. Editors have been automatically indenting bracketed code for a long while. Probably notepad doesn't, or maybe plain vanilla vim.
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