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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?

#621

Post by johndough »

regularfry wrote: post #543
gertlabs wrote: post #385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the recs, we will look into adding some of these, maybe OCaml for variety. I'm not familiar with Racket. Mistral Medium 3.5 is on there, but you will have to scroll down pretty far to find it (does not perform well): https://gertlabs.com/rankings?mode=oneshot_coding

What's going on with Qwen3.6 27b? Filtered to Python it comes out at the top of the list, which seems... well, unlikely.

While Qwen3.6 27B and 35B-A3B are very good, I am skeptical about them being that good. I think another factor is at play here.

The Qwen3.6 models have memorized some common games. For example, if you ask it to create an index.html with a snake game, it will generate almost the same high quality snake game every time. The relatively low success rate of 25% but high average percentile of almost 100% for one-shot coding in Python suggests that the model is extremely good at few tasks.

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

#622

Post by ashishb »

marliechiller wrote: post #583
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/

I dont know if the reasoning for a rewrite is purely for maintainability though. Ive used python at scale and its fine if you have reasonably good code hygiene. The reason I'd want to rewrite in any of those languages is they're significantly faster _and_ are maintainable at scale.

> Ive used python at scale and its fine if you have reasonably good code hygiene.

True but that's the problem. Once you have a big enough team, it becomes an uphill battle to maintain that.

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

#623

Post by roncesvalles »

DaanDL wrote: post #479
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 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...?

People confuse having fewer keywords/concepts to learn for readability, which is not really the same thing.

Someone who is equally expert at Java and Python will probably consider Java to be more readable.

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

#625

Post by DeathArrow »

CharlieDigital wrote: post #263
sshine wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I almost always pick Rust. Recently I wrote a plugin for something that was written in Go. I could have used Rust, but Go for one felt right because if the thing turned out well, others would surely find more value in having one toolchain. The main reason is that you’re capable of reading it if you need to. And the recipient ecosystem expects a language. That’s why some data science communities pick R, MatLab, Julia,…

C# feels kinda nice because it's a good balance. Very good static typing, Roslyn analyzers, good tooling and decent hot reload (for a compiled language), really good ORM (EF Core) that implements UoW and reduces a lot of the need for transaction management (simplifying the code), flexible enough and fast enough for various kinds of use cases. Source generators are underrated as well since they can make the code very…

>C# feels kinda nice because it's a good balance.

From my experience it's awesome to write C# with AI. But both Opus and GLM usually one shot the modification to the file so I didn't experienced cases lately where AI had to fix compile errors. True, I gave the AI agents the lsp for C#, so maybe that helps.

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

#626

Post by KptMarchewa »

DaanDL wrote: post #479
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 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...?

I think the meme come from the fact that in 00s and early 10s most people looked at Python code coming from C++ and Java.

In Java bad OOP conventions were commonplace, like everything using getters/setters, deeply nested class hierarchies and insane patterns like AbstractSingletonProxyFactoryBean. It got impossible to figure out what's going on.

C++ just got every possible feature that badly interacts with each other, in an amount that never could fit in a single person's context window. That basically led to a situation where every programmer or company had it's own dialect of the language; the other dialects than your own were mostly incomprehensive.

Python has it's own share of bad features, and for a long time really bad ecosystem around the language - Python 2 vs Python 3; eggs vs wheels; easy_install vs pip; 123489 ways of installing Python and each of them bad. But, once it started to become better, in the mid-late 10s, around Python 3.5 or 3.6, it exploded in popularity.

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

#627

Post by KptMarchewa »

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.

This is a 00s POV. If you spend any time on syntax formatting in 2026, you're wasting it. It's a solved problem.

Any reasonable language with braces has standard formatter that will just put each brace level on a different whitespace level.

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

#629

Post by RagnarD »

Really glad to see someone asking this question. After building a fairly significant AI tool using Python tools, I really wish AI/ML tools would all be rewritten to use an actually performant language - say, Rust - without transitive dependency hell on all the package versions.

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

#630

Post by DeathArrow »

alexjplant wrote: post #277
CharlieDigital wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

C# feels kinda nice because it's a good balance. Very good static typing, Roslyn analyzers, good tooling and decent hot reload (for a compiled language), really good ORM (EF Core) that implements UoW and reduces a lot of the need for transaction management (simplifying the code), flexible enough and fast enough for various kinds of use cases. Source generators are underrated as well since they can make the code very…

I've written this before, but C# is a great language held back by its culture. I'd say that 80% of C# shops I've seen used it because they were started in the late 00s by some IT guy with a surplus HP server and a dream whose whole world was Microsoft products. They were staffed by people with little knowledge of OSS products who self-identify as ".NET developers" instead of software engineers. Almost invariably they…

Hmm, I am working on C# microservices based apps since 6 years ago. And I always deployed on cloud using Linux, usually in Kubernetes. I used Google Cloud and AWS beside Azure.

The whole stack is open source, Kubernetes, Docker, Hashicorp tools, Postgres, Redis, MongoDB, RabbitMQ, NATS, Kafka, Prometheus, Elastic Search, Kibana, Grafana and so on and so forth.

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