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What's the best programming language for coding agents?

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Re: What's the best programming language for coding agents?

#71

Post by serf »

DarkContinent wrote: post #26

Is there a relationship between how good a programming language is for coding agents and how popular it is among humans? If so, wouldn't Python be the best language for agents, since it's is the most popular (and hence has the most context available for models)?

there is a relationship there, but there is also a relationship to the safety of the language and the guard rails in place.

it's a lot harder to experience an agent telling you with certainty that something incomplete is totally finished if there is a comprehensive test suite, a hard failing compiler, a strict type system, etc.

LLMs like to produce a lot of JS and python that silently fails in a graceful way -- why is that? because those languages support that kind of a failure.

when using something like go/rust the LLMs are more likely to re-iterate rather than declaring a victory when they get a strict compiler barking in their face, refusing to output.

Re: What's the best programming language for coding agents?

#72

Post by serf »

3eb7988a1663 wrote: post #42
DarkContinent wrote: post #26

Is there a relationship between how good a programming language is for coding agents and how popular it is among humans? If so, wouldn't Python be the best language for agents, since it's is the most popular (and hence has the most context available for models)?

Pick something slightly esoteric (eg Haskell) and the quality of public code is very high, because you only have enthusiasts writing it. Choose something taught in schools (Python) and you are going to find 10,000 traveling salesmen homework problems and Django todo applications. Not sure how you thread the needle on the quality vs quantity dynamic.

>Pick something slightly esoteric (eg Haskell) and the quality of public code is very high, because you only have enthusiasts writing it.

that and the language supports (enforces) good decision making; static typing w/ inference and a functional style as a first class concept.

which then rolls into the same result : higher quality code available.

Re: What's the best programming language for coding agents?

#73

Post by YuechenLi »

michaelteter wrote: post #64

I'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…

Go is absolutely one of the best programming languages for LLMs for the reason you say, and Python is just what LLMs like to use to write short throwaway scripts. Frontier LLMs are generally pretty good at most programming languages and can pick up new ones pretty quickly. Training data seems to mostly just increase the speed which they write code, for example, GPTs tend to write Rust and Python faster than other programming languages.

For actual output quality, the main deciding factor is simply how much tooling it is there for the LLMs to check their own work, as LLMs seemed to avoid using a lot of libraries in general. That's why C# is underrated due to the tooling strength of the .NET ecosystem, as long as you tell LLMs to avoid using reflections unless absolutely necessary.

C++ is also surprisingly good, but you pretty much have to tell the LLMs to treat it like Go and don't use any of the dangerous features for normal code.

Re: What's the best programming language for coding agents?

#74

Post by rapind »

MichaelNolan wrote: post #37

Ive been amazed at how well LLMs are at writing Gleam[1] and Lustre[2]. Compared to a mainstream language, there is basically zero gleam code in the training data. I have no evidence to back this up, but I suspect that languages that are good for humans[3] will be good for LLMs. Compiled, strongly typed, statically typed, immutable, pure functions, pattern matched, memory safe, etc. [1] https://gleam.run [2] https://…

I used to hold this opinion but since changing to Rust on the server and Typescript on the client, I can confidently tell you agents are so much better at Rust, especially at producing idiomatic code, than they are at Gleam.

There are reasons to love Gleam and Lustre (I like Gleam a lot), but LLMs just aren't one of them. I made the switch to Rust around May this year. Also the community is super anti-AI, arguably with good reason (how it impacts open source), and I'd recommend keeping your AI code to yourself.

Re: What's the best programming language for coding agents?

#75

Post by kpw94 »

michaelteter wrote: post #64

I'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…

Agree that go is the best due to its main design goal: A language that's simple for any programmer fitting that definition https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30688969.

> "They’re not capable of understanding a brilliant language but we want to use them to build good software. So, the language that we give them has to be easy for them to understand and easy to adopt."

This makes it a great language not just for young Googlers programmers, but also for LLM Agents!

IMO, the next big language will be similar philosophy, but without garbage collection. (is Zig the closest to filling that niche?)

Re: What's the best programming language for coding agents?

#76

Post by dosisking »

michaelteter wrote: post #64

I'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…

> 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.

Python's philosophy is there is one way to do it, as opposed to Perl's TIMTOWTDI.

Your statement also assumes that 'software engineers' write the best code, and from my experience, this is definitely not true

I believe the training data should simply be limited to only code written by someone like Fabrice Ballard, or whoever you think writes the best code.

Re: What's the best programming language for coding agents?

#79

Post by 9rx »

lyall wrote: post #43
9rx wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is doing something for yourself really working for free? That's an interesting take. But I can understand why you don't want this for yourself, so enjoy the page in all its splendour as it is already!

> Go to restaurant > Order food > Food comes out as raw, unprepared ingredients > Complain to chef > Tells me to go cook it myself > wtf, I'm not here to do work for free > "Is doing something for yourself really working for free?"

A closer analogy is going to a gas station where a microwave is offered to heat up any food you purchased. If you don't want to heat up the food, cool. If you expect the food to come hot you're in the wrong place.

Except in this case it's a gas station that only exists for the benefit of its owners and there isn't any food for sale. The owners have graciously said you could still use the microwave if you'd like, though.

Re: What's the best programming language for coding agents?

#80

Post by 9rx »

_doctor_love wrote: post #9
9rx wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is doing something for yourself really working for free? That's an interesting take. But I can understand why you don't want this for yourself, so enjoy the page in all its splendour as it is already!

So every person who reads Dan's blog and finds the layout too dense, they should write and maintain a stylesheet for his site? And every person globally should do this as well for any other website that doesn't have a good default reading experience?

CSS is explicitly designed for you to apply your own user stylesheet. That is exactly what it envisions you doing. If you don't like web technologies you might want to question what you are doing on the web. However, the web also encourages sharing, so no, theoretically once one user has created a user stylesheet they would share it with others so there would be no need for everyone to create their own, unless they had alternative tastes.

Actions speak louder than words.

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