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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?

#81

Post by grayrest »

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://…

For an even more niche language, Roc basically became usable in the new syntax about two months ago (still has compiler crashes, there's a good reason it hasn't had a real release) but Opus writes it just fine after a couple corrections to handle the language's quirks.

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

#82

Post by kayashaolu2 »

This is a great discussion: I wonder though if we are asking the right question. Yes, absolutely language choice can play a large role in the efficiency of coding agents. The point about Rust is right: static typing provides a fast verification loop at compile time. I would argue though that the way the codebase is composed could actually generalize the concept of "easy verifiability" past the actual coding language.

For instance, if an application can be broken down into components that have a verifiable contract in how they are to be used, then an LLM can load only the relevant modules into its context and fully understand how to use them and fix them if needed. It is also easier for the LLM to verify the functionality of a component rather than the entire system.

Additionally, in an application composed of functioning components, issues are more likely to occur at the boundaries between them, which the LLM can focus on rather than having to always consider the entire application that it most likely can't load fully into its context.

A well designed componentized Python application will likely be far more efficient for modification by an LLM than a large Rust monolith.

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

#83

Post by orojackson »

lemming wrote: post #16
_doctor_love wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I mean, if it really bothers you you could fairly trivially apply picocss or whatever to it using a user stylesheet. That is so little effort that calling it working for free would be disingenuous to say the least.

For people in the future who want to apply the centered viewport classless version of Pico CSS, just apply the following in Firefox's Style Editor (F12 to open DevTools, then click on Style Editor; click on the + sign to add a new style):

  @import url("https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/@picocss/pico@2/css/pico.classless.min.css");
I honestly did not know that until I took about 5-10 minutes looking up how to apply arbitrary styles in Firefox.

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

#84

Post by ethersteeds »

dosisking wrote: post #76
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…

But that's the trouble, Python has the slogan about only one way, but it's really not true in practice. Or maybe there's the one way that "should" be done, and then the half dozen other ways you'll encounter in the wild, as gp alluded.

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

#85

Post by bob1029 »

YuechenLi wrote: post #73
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 pro…

I think a lot of people are sleeping on the advantages of "batteries included" ecosystems.

The need to select an appropriate 3rd party library represents an entire dimension of the search space that can be eliminated. Imagine having to make this choice multiple times per day when your competition is just mindlessly using System.* types. The fact that the .NET ecosystem is curated by one entity should not be underestimated.

Even when we do need to import 3rd party nugets, the models seem to follow this highly structured pattern. They scan the xml docs, and failing that they will build a throwaway console app to reflect over all the unique types and build a report. The fact that we can easily do this with a simple powershell command makes a big difference. How many other ecosystems can even consider doing this? Reflection is a superpower, not something to be avoided.

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

#86

Post by otherme123 »

ethersteeds wrote: post #84
dosisking wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

But that's the trouble, Python has the slogan about only one way, but it's really not true in practice. Or maybe there's the one way that "should" be done, and then the half dozen other ways you'll encounter in the wild, as gp alluded.

Aren't LLMs a way to somehow extract the one way it should be done (or to be more precise, the more common way), over the half other ways? That correct way might be more difficult to extract from another languages that encourage multiple valid ways.

Also, if you trust the benchmarks, it seems that Python is, at the very least, decent enough for LLMs. There seems to be "no trouble" in practice, unless you show us better proof than "I feel like it must be bad for this and that".

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

#87

Post by fulafel »

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…

You can rather easily ship Clojure apps as single binaries, eg with this: https://github.com/avelino/jbundle

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

#88

Post by [deleted] »

YuechenLi wrote: post #73
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 pro…

[deleted]

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

#89

Post by KingMob »

Great post. If it wasn't clear by now, considering a language's token efficiency is almost certainly incorrect, since it's only a local optima for input/output of the code.

Most session tokens are spent elsewhere, so an LLM that handles a token-efficient language more poorly can be worse overall.

If anyone remembers TOON from a few months ago, it was an attempt to replace JSON with a more token-efficient representation. TOON was much more compact, but when researchers examined whole-session effects, it was a wash, because harnesses wasted more tokens than it saved dealing with it. (TBF, it's possible TOON use has gotten better if later models have it in their data set.)

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

#90

Post by maleldil »

frollogaston wrote: post #53
maleldil wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Python with a strict linter and type checker (eg ruff with the right lints on and ty with its stricter settings, or strict pyright if performance isn't too bad) works very well. Most of Python strengths (concise, large ecosystem, well represented in the LLM training data) while having good static analysis.

You don't need that, gets in the way more than it helps. Even Typescript isn't really needed, but at least it's decent devex unlike the Python typing stuff. What really helps is testing.

I trust the type system more than vibe tests.
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