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What's the best programming language for coding agents?
61–70 of 205 posts
Re: What's the best programming language for coding agents?
#62It's not clear to me how useful of a signal replicating existing pieces of well-known software is for this kind of evaluation, given what we know about how effectively LLMs can retrieve data from their training corpus and style-transfer it across different settings (programming languages here). That would explain their convergence in ability across different languages on the tasks in this post. I'd be far more intere…
I tried writing an AI harness in Python. Seemed the obvious way to go. Tons of libraries. Libraries for talking to model APIs. Libraries for context and conversation management. Libraries for talking to MCPs. It is the language for LLMs!
It was a shit show and just couldn't write anything that would not crash. Super confident it had done a good job. Full of random bugs. A UI needs interactivity, interruption, handling exceptions. It produced some of the worst code I've ever seen. And looking at the libraries' code: also some of the worst code I've ever seen.
I switched to rust + tauri. In about three person weeks of work I have UI with forking conversations, tool use with built in grepping, tons of quality tools. It's more productive (for me) than Claude Code (CLI or desktop).
Re: What's the best programming language for coding agents?
#63I've long suspected that LLMs will just output pure bits eventually
Why would this be the case when the text that produces binaries (code) is usually both more token efficient and vastly more effectively organized for modification/extension?
Unless by bits you just mean text in general, or any data since it’s all bits, in which case what you’re saying is trivially already true.
It seems like you’re saying that long term LLMs will output pure machine code as the most effective way to use them.
Re: What's the best programming language for coding agents?
#64I'm not sure I trust a source that says "just 70 tokens average, nearly half of Clojure (109 tokens)".
There's no reason to add the phrase "nearly half of", and there's especially no reason to add it when it's significantly far away from half.
But on the main topic, I still feel that Go is an excellent choice for LLMs. There is pretty much just one way of doing most things, and the available training data is pretty consistent. This is very different from Python, where training data is polluted (I presume) with tons of code written by non-software engineers and demonstrating many different ways of doing the same thing.
Also a big plus for Go is the tooling. Fast compiles and good linting shortens the iteration cycle time, resulting in less need for me to tell the LLM to correct mistakes.
For some reason, most LLMs I've used default to wanting to write Python. I have to repeatedly teach them to use Go unless there is a very compelling reason to choose otherwise.
I would personally rather see and use Clojure, but I don't feel its ecosystem would provide the same benefits as Go, including obviously the easy single binary distribution.
Re: What's the best programming language for coding agents?
#65I love Dan's writing. I really do. But I don't understand why he doesn't have some basic styling on his blog so that it's easier to read.
body { margin: 5%; }
That's all it needs, responsive enough for all devices. He can keep his styleless design but margin is always needed.
Re: What's the best programming language for coding agents?
#66It's not clear to me how useful of a signal replicating existing pieces of well-known software is for this kind of evaluation, given what we know about how effectively LLMs can retrieve data from their training corpus and style-transfer it across different settings (programming languages here). That would explain their convergence in ability across different languages on the tasks in this post. I'd be far more intere…
I tried writing an AI harness in Python. Seemed the obvious way to go. Tons of libraries. Libraries for talking to model APIs. Libraries for context and conversation management. Libraries for talking to MCPs. It is the language for LLMs! It was a shit show and just couldn't write anything that would not crash. Super confident it had done a good job. Full of random bugs. A UI needs interactivity, interruption, handlin…
Yeah, I've had similar experiences, also starting out with dynamic languages and migrating to Rust. If the LLM will write a lot of the code for me, why not choose something (1) super fast, and (2) which has types I can use to understand and specify the code I want without having to read all the output?
I've been trying out Lean for related reasons, to good effect. It's really interesting there since it can crank out proofs that would've been completely infeasible for a dedicated team of PhDs before, whereas I haven't seen any LLM projects written in Python that I couldn't have slung out in a few months myself. I personally think it's a lot more interesting to focus on the new things you can now do with LLMs that weren't possible before, as opposed to doing the same old stuff at moderately higher velocity.
Re: What's the best programming language for coding agents?
#67I'm not sure I trust a source that says "just 70 tokens average, nearly half of Clojure (109 tokens)". There's no reason to add the phrase "nearly half of", and there's especially no reason to add it when it's significantly far away from half. But on the main topic, I still feel that Go is an excellent choice for LLMs. There is pretty much just one way of doing most things, and the available training data is pretty c…
I like Go with agents too but:
> This is very different from Python, where training data is polluted (I presume) with tons of code written by non-software engineers and demonstrating many different ways of doing the same thing.
Counter-example: agents with Django-related stuff. Excellent output.
Re: What's the best programming language for coding agents?
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
Python with a strict linter and type checker (eg ruff with the right lints on and ty with its stricter settings, or strict pyright if performance isn't too bad) works very well. Most of Python strengths (concise, large ecosystem, well represented in the LLM training data) while having good static analysis.
You don't need that, gets in the way more than it helps. Even Typescript isn't really needed, but at least it's decent devex unlike the Python typing stuff. What really helps is testing.
I try to capture as much as possible in types/schemas/constraints (then lint rules) and then only as a last resort write tests. And as few and complementary as possible. And I want a functional core with unit tests and imperative shell and not a bunch of complex mocks. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Re: What's the best programming language for coding agents?
#69I love Dan's writing. I really do. But I don't understand why he doesn't have some basic styling on his blog so that it's easier to read.
Enabling 'reader mode' in supporting browsers usually takes care of this.
Re: What's the best programming language for coding agents?
#70I'd like to see the results for Ada on these same measures. On the theory that the Ada type system covers more classes of errors than other languages, and so AI can self correct better.
Unfortunately for static type weenies like me (and you, presumably), types don't seem to matter at all, or Python and Javascript wouldn't be on top. There's no reason to believe that Ada's type system is so unique that it alone can help AI self-correct, and Rust, Haskell, ML, Typescript, etc. can't.
Well the reason I'm interested in Ada is because I saw a study that showed AI did worse at functional programming. So that might explain the problems with Haskell et al. But Ada has a strong type system while still having procedural code. So it would be an interesting comparison with Haskell etc. if the problem was that Haskell is functional or if the problem was that these are not so popular.