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by yodon 20 days ago
I wish they'd do a follow-on post drilling into the impact of the programming language on cost-per-task, specifically looking at cost to complete tasks in mainstream strongly typed languages (eg. C#, TypeScript) vs dynamic languages (eg. Python, JavaScript). Does the additional verbosity of the language help or hurt cost per task?
2 comments
trollbridge 20 days ago
I don't have hard data, but we have shifted to Rust and Swift (for frontend UI) for the bulk of our dev simply because it is a lot more predictable, easier for tool calls to edit, the build steps produce easier output for the agent to loop on, the tests are easier to write/get results from, etc., although I am mostly measuring this in time, not cost.

Once the thing is rock-solid it's relatively easy to do a Swift->HTTP/HTML/CSS/React/TypeScript conversion.

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rootatixww3 20 days ago
for that you would need to compare the same task implemented in two different languages - C# and Python for example, no?
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yodon 14 days ago
The advantage of their dataset is it's large enough that you have a statistical number of PR's, allowing you to treat the average cost of Python PR's vs the average cost of C# costs (or etc.) as statistically meaningful.
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