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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?

#741

Post by bfrog »

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…

Funny, I need an LLM to figure out what most people consider "readable" python as its highly unreadable to me. The lack of types, top to bottom flow, and more tends to make it all very confusing for me to read anything python that's > ~1000loc

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

#742

Post by Yokohiii »

gertlabs wrote: post #449
fulafel wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What would comparing rates across languages tell in the context of this benchmark? Are the tasks the same or robustly difficulty-normalized across the languages? Also somehow the 2 language comparison graphs (avg percentile and success rate) rank Python in dramatically different positions, with Python outranking Rust and Java in the success rate. What does the avg percentile mean in this context?

Success rate measures the amount of code submissions that played the game/environment without failing (compilation, breaking game rules, violating sandbox, etc.), so it makes sense Python would do better there. Percentile compares only the submissions that didn't hard-fail. So they are a bit different, and we incorporate them both into the combined score.

Comparing rust to javascript, the gscore is rather similar in distribution, while python falls off. I don't see why python should be so much worse?

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

#743

Post by tommit »

raincole wrote: post #451
xrd wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They have made an honest attempt to pay writers. It's a different model than substack, but that's why. I look at it the same way I look at pay walls for newspapers. I don't like them but I understand why they are there.

Which is why it failed though. It turns out people won't pay one dollar to read an article like "If AI writes your code, why use Python?" The situation is very unfortunate. We had perhaps once-in-a-lifetime chance to solve micropayment but we fucked up (crypto).

yup, I still wonder if BAT was onto something. loved the idea, never took off. oh well

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

#744

Post by nallerooth »

locusofself wrote: post #329

Most of the article makese sense but what is this supposed to mean? "Native Rust binaries are hostile to serverless runtimes" . I don't think that is true.

It feels like a really strange thing to say. I've deployed Rust binaries to both Lambda and Fargate in AWS and they've been very performant.

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

#745

Post by Yokohiii »

coldtea wrote: post #454
adastra22 wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This must really depend on your niche. I assume you do web stuff or something? Good luck finding any golang examples in a lot of other fields. Rust, on the other hand, is taking over the world in systems programming.

> Good luck finding any golang examples in a lot of other fields. There are go examples (and full blown programs) for anything, from servers to Kubernetes and Docker.

which is pretty much webdev for the larger industry.

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

#746

Post by isityettime »

regularfry wrote: post #541
isityettime wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would love to see how they do with functional languages and especially Lisps here. I've noticed pretty good performance with Emacs Lisp relative to overall model strength, but I haven't used LLMs to application code in any such languages. It would also be interesting to see how Python compares to other languages in its niche (Ruby, Perl, Raku). Thanks for putting this together! It's interesting.

I've noticed that with clojure(script) unless you specifically instruct them to keep nesting levels low, they can hit a point where they make a paren placement error and can't debug their way out of it. Although in my case while one model made the error then couldn't find what it had done, a second model that I switched to was then able to identify it and back it out. So I suspect this is a transient weakness in toda…

It's a bit of a pitiful way to fail. I wonder if diffusion models could handle parenthesis matching better. And I wonder if you could rig up tools for structural editing like with paredit.

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

#747

Post by luodaint »

But under this frame, it appears that the developer's task involves prompt engineering. This is not the case.

Even if an agent generates 90% of the code, each and every diff is going to be in my review queue. Code readability of Python isn't an advantage during write; it's an advantage while reviewing. As an agent generates a piece of code, I will have to read the code, comprehend the code, and determine whether it does what I want. This is the other 10% of the task, and it's the crucial one.

Python is, thus, clearly superior to other languages in terms of ease of review.

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

#748

Post by benjiro3000 »

adastra22 wrote: post #341
bfung wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. Amount of Rust training data isn’t as much as Go. 2. Golang syntax and style is very verbose yet simple. There’s not as many options nor programming language to domain mapping needed as in Rust. Leads to needing less sophisticated LLM to spit out Golang than Rust successfully and efficiently.

This must really depend on your niche. I assume you do web stuff or something? Good luck finding any golang examples in a lot of other fields. Rust, on the other hand, is taking over the world in systems programming.

[dead]

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

#750

Post by echelon »

Yokohiii wrote: post #725
therouwboat wrote: post #663

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Come on now, how do you learn anything if you just tell claude to do something and feed it error messages?

Yeah, I don't think you really learn a language with agentic coding, at least you wont become fluent writing it. I currently use copy pasta chatbot help to write some C code and I am still often stuck how to progress manually. And I refactor a lot because the LLM code is subpar for me.

  > Yeah, I don't think you really learn a language with agentic coding
  > [...] 
  > And I refactor a lot because the LLM code is subpar for me.
This is learning.
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