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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?

#91

Post by 9rx »

kpw94 wrote: post #75
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 you…

> is Zig the closest to filling that niche?

Given what you said about Go, presumably that is Solod (https://solod.dev)

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

#92

Post by jillesvangurp »

What's optimal for LLMs and for people is probably not going to be the same. People are a bit lazy.

Coding agents do much more than generating code though. Much of what they do relates to validating that what was generated is a valid solution. That includes everything from type checking, running tests, static code analysis, linting, running code in a headless browser, etc. The more tools agents have at their disposal, the better the feedback loop gets. But of course some of these tools are costly to run.

Statically compiled languages have a head start here as they simply exclude entire categories of bugs that a dynamically typed language might have. And with things like type inference, their token overhead can be pretty minimal. Modern languages like Kotlin or Swift are pretty compact and don't really add a lot of bloat relative to say typescript/javascript. Go is a bit more verbose but tends to work well. Rust seems pretty popular with LLM users as well. The main challenge with languages like this is the performance hit you take running their build tools. Doing that a lot slows you down and it burns a lot of tokens as well.

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

#93

Post by fulafel »

frollogaston wrote: post #35
genxy wrote: post #34

What is the best language for the user of the LLM? What is the best language to have high quality correctness oracles so that the user doesn't have to babysit the LLM and do lots of manual testing?

JS is the best tradeoff between succinct and easy to understand. Python is next but has some rough edges that they avoided in JS.

JS gives you wrong answers silently when thigns go sideways since for the original browser use case, they didn't want scripts to ever stop execution. It's the opposite of Python in this respect.

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

#94

Post by 9rx »

orojackson wrote: post #83
lemming wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 arbitrar…

Browser vendors have really dropped the ball in supporting CSS, which is no doubt how we get comments like the above. Firefox is likely the least-worst offender, but as you point out still needlessly complicated for what CSS considers to be a foundational feature.

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

#95

Post by saidnooneever »

C and C++ do well because there is most literature and code out there to help them reason about it. C is helpful because it has little hidden runtime for them to trip over.

that being said, those languages obviously have limits in applicability looking at the entire spectrum of software. JS, python and others still have useful domains.

i dont think newer languages as rust are better for LLMs as they might be for new programmers. for new programmers they offer extra features but for an LLM this is added potential to make mistakes. Also a lot of newer languages are less stable so you can realise their current implementations might not be fully trained on by the models or even be after their cutoff date..

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

#97

Post by jbotz »

est wrote: post #78

Python has a less known advantage because it had no curly braces, so LLMs can focus its attention to logic instead of syntax. https://blog.est.im/2026/stdin-11

It's unclear that this is an advantage, certainly not in terms of "logic vs syntax".

First of all programs written in curly-brace languages still also have indentation to indicate statement grouping / blocks / scope, even if it's not required, so for a correct program (and that's not deliberately obfuscated), and one that's in the process of being written by an LLM, any advantage there disappears. Furthermore, having both indentation and explicit block markers provides redundancy which could be a significant advantage for an LLM (it being a probabilistic text / program generator). And for an incorrect program that redundancy is a big advantage for the LLM because it should be very easy for it to notice a mismatch of indentation and braces.

The only downside would be a very slightly higher token cost for the redundancy. I realize that Python comes out on or near the top in most of the comparisons in the linked article, but I doubt that's the reason.

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

#98

Post by win311fwg »

JodieBenitez wrote: post #67
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…

I like Go with agents too but: > 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. Counter-example: agents with Django-related stuff. Excellent output.

I think you will find that is a supporting example. Django pushes for a particular style and structure, which is a similar property found in the Go community.

LLMs seem to fall apart where human written projects of the same nature had no particular way about them. It is especially apparent when treading into waters where beginners are found. Like the earlier comment suggests, this is presumably because the LLMs struggle to find any kind of pattern to latch onto. Django offers a pattern, but one not shared by rest of the Python ecosystem. Whereas virtually all Go codebases look the same.

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

#99

Post by boxed »

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…

> 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.

And yet this article has pretty strong empirical data to show that your intuition here is incorrect. You should back up your statement with something more than vibes.

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

#100

Post by majoe »

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…

> 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.

For existing codebases I made the experience, that LLMs are very good at replicating their style.

At work most of our C++ codebases use a fairly consistent style and subset of C++ features and to my initial surprise specifying style conventions etc explicitly turned out to be mostly superfluous.

Of course, we also have some legacy projects originally, written in ANSI C, which only received a few changes in the last 15 years to compile with a C++ compiler. Here a style guide is helpful, bit I consider it more like a temporary instruction for refactoring.

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