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esafaklast Sunday at 1:43 PM4 repliesview on HN

I don't understand why Perl, R, and AppleScript rank so much higher than their observed use.


Replies

rozablast Sunday at 1:50 PM

Perl and Applescript are close to natural language. R is close to plain maths

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Perl

londonlawyerlast Sunday at 6:47 PM

The prominence of AppleScript ought to have been a pretty big red flag: the author seems to be claiming the model was trained on more AppleScript than Python, which simply can’t be true.

Ironically LLMs seem pretty bad at writing AppleScript, I think because (i) the syntax is English-like but very brittle, (ii) the application dictionaries are essential but generally not on the web, and (iii) most of the AppleScript that is on the web has been written by end users, often badly.

jxmorris12last Monday at 3:31 AM

It seems to be an error with the classifier. Sorry everyone. I probably shouldn't have posted that graph; I knew it was buggy, I just thought that the Perl part might be interesting to people.

Here's a link to the model if you want to dive deeper: https://huggingface.co/philomath-1209/programming-language-i...

j_bumlast Sunday at 7:03 PM

R being so high makes no sense to me either.

I think as of the last Stack Overflow developer survey, it only had ~4% market share…

I say this as an R user who spams LLMs with R on a daily basis.