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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?

#651

Post by jorvi »

hiAndrewQuinn wrote: post #470
bryanrasmussen wrote: post #463

Earlier quoted context omitted.

hmm, yeah given LLM's ability to churn out lots of code quickly and be overly verbose in that code that is a potential downside. That it could in a quick one time edit create so much intellectual overhead that Python might be the wrong language to understand what is going on. What language do you feel is easier to reason about in the large?

Haskell would be my vote, and Rust too, actually, both because of their very strong type systems. The type system lets you very quickly figure out what something is before you figure out what something does , and it turns out that separating those two concerns as hard as those two languages do often results in doing the whole one-two punch faster.

Bit of a nit, it isn't the strong typing that makes Rust great for LLMs, it's the very strict compiler.

Plenty of languages have strong (enough) typing but their compilers happily let you or the LLM footgun yourself.

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

#652

Post by pshirshov »

tdeck wrote: post #649
pshirshov wrote: post #613

No reason, unless the project is simple. The more you can offload onto your compiler/typer - the shorter is the feedback loop, the better agents work. Lack of strictly enforced static typing make agents fail much sooner with Python. In my opinion, Rust and Scala are the best targets for agentic flows - and, coincidentally, they have the most advanced typers among mainstream languages. But any statically typed languag…

What if you want to offload a lot of the work to libraries rather than generating (and presumably reviewing?) it yourself? Python has a very strong ecosystem of useful libraries because it's been around so long and is popular in a number of application domains.

Well, Python is not the only language with a mature ecosystem.

Also, in many cases it's cheaper to rewrite a small lib instead of fighting crappy code - but that applies regardless of the target language.

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

#654

Post by Decabytes »

I legit have had this same thought. If we are going to be writing programs with AI, We should be programming in a more performant and explicit way, with statically typed programming languages that are able to encode the invariants in the program, even if it requires programming in a way that would be tedious for humans

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

#656

Post by bityard »

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...?

Python USED to be easy to read, before a lot of the newer features like type hints crept in. 20 years ago, Python looked like executable pseudocode.

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

#657

Post by RHSeeger »

roncesvalles wrote: post #623
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...?

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.

I have many years of experience with Java, and rarely use Python... and I'd say Python is, in general, easier to read. There's generally a lot less "having to go look at _other_ code to know what _this_ code is doing".

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

#658

Post by RHSeeger »

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.

Whitespace and braces work together to make the code more readable; both by the computer and the human. And they make it less likely to have errors, because the braces convey intent (much like parens in math when they're not "needed")

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

#659

Post by t0mas88 »

arw0n wrote: post #408
DeathArrow wrote: post #356

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. Or any of the faster typed languages you are most comfortable with, as you might need to look at the code some times. LLMs are great at writing and understanding C# and Java.

Also there are still considerations like domain, team expertise, org ecosystem etc. to consider. I love to use Rust for most things, but now I'm working with an org that primarily has expertise in Java, and I'm not going to rock the boat for barely any reason. Python is also still useful for most ML stuff, and Django is quite a pleasure to work with (although it wouldn't be my first choice). The great thing about LLM…

Same here, working with a team that knows Java, so I'm letting Claude write Java.

If I compare the results to another team that uses Python with Claude I see slightly better results on the Java side. Not because Claude knows that better, but because the tools are more rigid by default which creates more of a self correcting loop for Claude. The Python side has Pydantic, but it's a bit of an afterthought, while in Java you can't skip the type checking.

In the end you can do the same things on both sides, it's 95% a team/engineering culture difference. So pick the language that the team knows best.

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