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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?

#73
post #58
post #14

Python has a much more mature ecosystem than Rust, especially for AI/ML stuff. I ran into a rust crate that purported to do a certain ML algorithm but did not do it correctly. I managed to write a replacement with Claude though. I do think enforcing correctness at the type system level is a good idea for AI, which is why I often choose languages like C# and Rust over Python. However, for some things Python is definit…

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,…

What peers are speaking Mojo? I’m not aware of any place it’s penetrated enough to be a “lingua Franca”

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

#75
post #29

AI's are really good with Python. Quick turnaround. Easy to read. Tons of training data/examples. Many of the same reasons we wrote Python before. Another benefit to using Python, is if you subscribe to writing/vibing a throwaway version first, a Python version is 100x better than a spec. (Disclaimer: I teach Python and AI for a living and am doing a tutorial at pycon this week, Beyond vibe coding. Am also using othe…

Problem with Python and other non-strict typed languages is that if you let an LLM to write some stuff, you cannot truly be confident that nothing has broken. Even if your tests all pass. The LLM could have broken some path that only gets run in production in a very specific case. At least with strongly-typed languages you get a compiler error. In big codebases is non-negotiable

Python has had type hinting for quite a while, and adding validation with mypy/pyright/ty as a step in CLAUDE.md (as well as having it as part of your CI pipeline) can emulate static type checking pretty well.

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

#77
post #29

AI's are really good with Python. Quick turnaround. Easy to read. Tons of training data/examples. Many of the same reasons we wrote Python before. Another benefit to using Python, is if you subscribe to writing/vibing a throwaway version first, a Python version is 100x better than a spec. (Disclaimer: I teach Python and AI for a living and am doing a tutorial at pycon this week, Beyond vibe coding. Am also using othe…

Problem with Python and other non-strict typed languages is that if you let an LLM to write some stuff, you cannot truly be confident that nothing has broken. Even if your tests all pass. The LLM could have broken some path that only gets run in production in a very specific case. At least with strongly-typed languages you get a compiler error. In big codebases is non-negotiable

Dynamically typed languages just add one more type of bug that can’t be caught at compile time. That’s not helpful, sure, but it’s one type of bug among many.

The issue you mention, execution paths not hit by test cases, is made worse by having more complicated code. Duck-typing can help reduce the number of paths.

Static vs dynamic… I don’t see an obvious winner here.

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

#78

AI's are really good with Python. Quick turnaround. Easy to read. Tons of training data/examples. Many of the same reasons we wrote Python before. Another benefit to using Python, is if you subscribe to writing/vibing a throwaway version first, a Python version is 100x better than a spec. (Disclaimer: I teach Python and AI for a living and am doing a tutorial at pycon this week, Beyond vibe coding. Am also using othe…

I figure a big part of it is that SWE-Bench is the target benchmark for programming and it's all python.

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

#79
post #29

AI's are really good with Python. Quick turnaround. Easy to read. Tons of training data/examples. Many of the same reasons we wrote Python before. Another benefit to using Python, is if you subscribe to writing/vibing a throwaway version first, a Python version is 100x better than a spec. (Disclaimer: I teach Python and AI for a living and am doing a tutorial at pycon this week, Beyond vibe coding. Am also using othe…

Problem with Python and other non-strict typed languages is that if you let an LLM to write some stuff, you cannot truly be confident that nothing has broken. Even if your tests all pass. The LLM could have broken some path that only gets run in production in a very specific case. At least with strongly-typed languages you get a compiler error. In big codebases is non-negotiable

My take is that I can never be confident that anything an LLM produce will not be broken. Since I will have to check everything it produces anyways, why not write it in a human friendly language, i.e. python? C and rust may have better strictness, but the amount of boiler code to set up that system takes up a lot of mental space that could be better used to architect the problem at hand.

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

#80
Read the first few comments and surprised I didn’t see it, but training data. The voluminous amount of Python in the training data.

I could write in brainfuck with ai, but I presume, wouldn’t get the same results than if going with python.

My follow up question: with AI now, why care about a lang until you need to?

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