alt Hacker NewsWho cares? Languages are tools, LLMs are tools. Use the ones more appropriate for what you are trying to do.
Is Go better than CSS if you are doing web layouts? Is it better than zig if you are outputting minimal wasm deliverables? Is it better than swift if you are doing iOS specific development? Is it better than bash for OS scripting?
Think about what you are doing and choose appropriately. This was true before LLMs.
Are you having fun? Chose LISP then
Replies
The article is about which tool is more appropriate, and you're dodging that question. Every use case has multiple langs you could use for it, and there's no universally agreed-upon choice. Like if you're writing a typical web API backend with LLM assistance from scratch, which do you use between JS, Py, Java, Go, Rust, etc?
Been doing bash scripting for years. Tried Go recently, on my, it’s so much better for everything OS scripting. I regret I haven’t started with Go years ago. All my scripts are rewritten to Go. I kept only a handful, those that are just a few lines and no logic.
> Is it better than zig if you are outputting minimal wasm deliverables?
Which tradeoffs are you willing to accept? Zig (along with several other languages) is superior in a lot of ways for that type of job, but I still settled on Go for a particular minimal WASM (browser) project. It wasn't my first choice, but it was where I ended up because LLMs kept going out to lunch in other languages and I didn't have anywhere close to the required budget to write it by hand. I read some comments like these about Go in the past so the Go attempt was mostly a contrarian Hail Mary after so many previous failed attempts in more technically well suited languages and... it worked! Shockingly well.
It still isn't my first choice for it, but having something useful with happy users beats technical imperfection every day of the week as far as my needs go. Go really did show its worth as an LLM target for that particular workload. Whether or not that is reproducible for any other project remains to be seen, but there seems to be a growing sentiment that echos the same. There just might be something to it.
> Who cares? [sorry, but that question is trolling]
People who want to use the most appropriate tool.
> Use the ones more appropriate for what you are trying to do.
What they are trying to do is find a programming language that LLMs work well with.
> So you are using Go with LLMs for the objective and destination of token consumption for token consumption sake?
The trolling gets more intense with each comment ...
P.S. Someone else responded:
> But this isn't a user story. The user story is what you should be picking the tool for.
I don't see how this is at all relevant to my comments. I'm certainly not going to argue about what some other party should or should not be doing.
> Who cares? Languages are tools, LLMs are tools. Use the ones more appropriate for what you are trying to do.
The article specifically discusses how Go is well-suited for LLMs. It's not going on about general programming topics.