alt Hacker NewsI keep seeing these language specific proclamations, and they are annoying and reek of inexperience to me.
I’ve had a great time doing LLM assisted coding in Zig, and it seems comparable to the generic Typescript/React I do at work.
I don’t doubt simplicity and good PL design pay dividends, but everyone’s favorite language can’t be the silver bullet in our new LLM world. Things just don’t add up, and I keep seeing it for Erlang, Gleam, Lisp, C, Rust, Go, TypeScript, Python, etc.
And to pick on Go a little bit, I don’t think it has any unique qualities that make it better for LLMs, where I think you could make that argument for other modern languages that offer new features leveraging their compilers and enforcing more correctness guarantees.
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> leveraging their compilers and enforcing more correctness guarantees.
The counter argument here is that these checks cause slower compile times and were designed to prevent common mistakes humans make.
If models get good, they may not need the same checks human written code needs. For example, frontier models already will virtually never produce a typo.
Humans need time to think, but a model’s bottleneck is in how quickly it can verify its work. Slower compile times hurt a models ability to iterate.
I don’t think we’re there yet (and we may not get there). But there is an argument to be made that languages with faster compile times may be better for LLMs in the long run than languages with strong checks but slow compilation.
compilation time is massively important for developing with agents