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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?

#911

Post by iLemming »

isityettime wrote: post #597
gertlabs wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a good idea. Would you rather see Lisp or Scala? Any interest in Prolog? We are trying to be selective to keep the data concentrated, but we will eventually add a couple more, most likely to sample different programming paradigms.

I think Clojure would probably make for a more interesting comparison because its syntax is more different from the other languages currently on there and it's less multi-paradigm than Scala is (it doesn't support OOP, it's more explicitly immutable-first). I think Scala is a lovely and cool language, but I'd be more interested in the Clojure comparison here. Prolog night be interesting because I bet nobody is trying…

> it doesn't support OOP

That is only accurate if OOP means "inheritance-based class hierarchies with mutable state" - which is one narrow definition of it. Clojure has solid OOP support, just not in the class-hierarchy-first sense.

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

#912

Post by Quitschquat »

slashdev wrote: post #786

The static vs dynamic language debate is decisively over and static has won. I called this out back in 2023, and I've only become more convinced since then. Statically typed languages are easier for the reader because you can see the types and quickly jump to their definitions (or even just hover over them in some IDEs). They're easier for the AI because they provide natural guardrails and feedback to guide it, as we…

> I called this out back in 2023

People have been "calling this out" for decades. Yet the most productive languages are still dynamic/strongly typed.

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

#913

Post by mightybyte »

munksbeer wrote: post #498
repiret wrote: post #345

My experience is that there's a correlation between powerful type systems and the property that once your program compiles, it's correct. Compiles == correct is rarely true in C or JavaScript. It's often true in Haskell and Rust. TypeScript is somewhere in between C and Rust. There's a niche available for a language which is relatively easy for a human to read, but with a very powerful at the expense of difficult to…

>My experience is that there's a correlation between powerful type systems and the property that once your program compiles, it's correct. Compiles == correct is rarely true in C or JavaScript. It's often true in Haskell and Rust. I find this staggeringly hard to believe. Most bugs are logic errors. How does Rust or Haskell prevent these?

Haskell gives you quite a powerful set of tools for constraining and reasoning about your program's behavior. For instance, its ability to define pure functions and control side effects is a very powerful tool for preventing certain classes of bugs. Dereferencing invalid pointer locations and out of bounds array lookups are large classes of bugs in mainstream languages that Haskell basically eliminates entirely. It's not at all the same thing as what you get from the type systems in languages like Java, C++, etc. You really have to try it to appreciate it.

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

#915

Post by barkingcat »

bryanrasmussen wrote: post #463
simonask wrote: post #456

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Python is locally readable. Reasoning about larger systems in Python is where things get really hard, because you have to describe how many small individually readable things interact with each other in a very limited vocabulary.

hmm, yeah given LLM's ability to churn out lots of code quickly and be overly verbose in that code that is a potential downside. That it could in a quick one time edit create so much intellectual overhead that Python might be the wrong language to understand what is going on. What language do you feel is easier to reason about in the large?

get LLM to write ADA and have it use SPARK for verification.

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

#916

Post by tasuki »

aryehof wrote: post #269

This seems to assume that all there is, is systems software, tools and frameworks. Why ignore the elephant in the room - business / enterprise / line-of-business software? The case for Rust, Go, Gleam and Zig vastly changes for these versus Java or C#.

Gleam is not a systems language. It's business / enterprise / parallel - running on Erlang's BEAM VM.

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

#917

Post by jimbokun »

DaanDL wrote: post #479
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…

I never really understood what exactly is so readable about python. I've been developing in Python for 8 years now, and before that I was a C# developer, and I don't find Python to be that more readable. Sure there's less ceremony, and yes, you can have your project going with just a single file, but other than that...?

Well yeah.

Dropping the ceremony means all that’s left is the ideas and the intent of the code. Which is exactly what you want for optimal readability.

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

#919

Post by shimman »

stingraycharles wrote: post #369
gertlabs wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Surprisingly, LLMs are actually much worse at reasoning in Python than other common programming languages for agentic coding tasks. Data here: https://gertlabs.com/rankings?mode=agentic_coding

I’m super surprised that C++ scores so high, this does not match our experience at all, and for anything performance critical it always drops the ball completely. I also don’t understand how these “games” map to real world complex problems. How are you measuring success? How does “adversarial customer service” map to “this LLM is better at C++ than the other” ? How are you sure you’re not just benchmarking language s…

It's a VC backed company using "scoreboards" as a means of marketing. There is nothing scientific or academic about this, stop assuming as much.

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

#920

Post by MaxBarraclough »

adam_arthur wrote: post #799
slashdev wrote: post #786

The static vs dynamic language debate is decisively over and static has won. I called this out back in 2023, and I've only become more convinced since then. Statically typed languages are easier for the reader because you can see the types and quickly jump to their definitions (or even just hover over them in some IDEs). They're easier for the AI because they provide natural guardrails and feedback to guide it, as we…

Strong typing has clearly won. However, verbose typing is likely a negative for LLMs. Algorithms written in "pseudo-code", aka a higher level language without type information, are far more readable to a human, and thus likely an LLM too. In regards to control flow and general concept of what code is doing, types provide very little info over well named variables. In fact they often impair understanding by breaking u…

Strong typing is not a synonym for static typing, it refers to a different aspect of type safety.

Static typing is, roughly, where variables and expressions have fixed types that can be determined ahead of execution. Strong typing means the language doesn't offer implicit type conversions. Python is dynamically typed, i.e. not statically typed, and strongly typed. (Ignoring its type annotations feature, of course.)

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