[wg0]

This could be a subjective feeling with no real data to back it up.

People say same about Go as well that it's type system and limited feature set makes it the best AI friendly language but there too, it just seems like a hunch rather than a proven fact.

[treyd]

The thing is that this argument doesn't work with Go because its type system (and the whole language, really) is much less expressive and compiler gives a lot less feedback to the LLM. So it tends to have to write more unit tests and do more cycles of testing (and spend more tokens) to get it right.

[wg0]

The argument about type system is absurd anyway. The types in a program aren't a universal vocabulary that the LLM would already know about like the words of English language. They are unique to each program and domain so an LLM can't be better at it.

Let me elaborate further - it's like the proficiency of LLMs in writing English vs writing Sawahili or Kurdish.

The types of a program are like Swahili or Kurdish etc even worse because those languages still have sizeable chuck on the Internet and digital archives but types of a program are very specific to it.

[treyd]

Studies have shown that natural human languages are all more or less equally expressive in terms of bits per second while speaking. There's lots of different ways they can be structured but they tend to follow common rules that have been well-characterized by linguists. They can be used to describe formal mathematical statements, but are not rigorously formal languages themselves.

Programming languages, in contrast, are constructed and vary much more in their designs. They are formal languages, making them closer to math than spoken language. LLMs being able to describe concepts more thoroughly and precisely through more expressive semantics obviously makes some languages more suitable than others.

The type system of a language is just one aspect of it that allows the language to provide guarantees to the LLM (and the user) about correctness of the code it's writing.

I am not speaking about specific types in specific programs. I am talking about the ability to describe complex constraints that LLMs (and humans) end up using to make writing correct code easier and more productive. Some programming languages absolutely are more effective at this than others, and that's always been true even before LLMs.

[Onavo]

If we are gonna go down that rabbit hole, then the natural conclusion is Haskell.

[robocat]

How good are LLMs at understanding Haskell errors and then dealing with them?

The last time I had a go with Haskell, the errors reminded me so much of hellish terminal compilers from the 80s and 90s that I quickly gave up. Been there, not doing that again.

[boxed]

Which seems pretty reasonable tbh. Claude Code is amazing with Elm in my experience.

[solumunus]

Well those people are simply wrong. Go and Rust type systems don't even remotely compare. Go types suck.