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Posted by indigodaddy 20 hours ago

If AI writes your code, why use Python?(medium.com)
729 points | 755 commentspage 7
munro 19 hours ago|
Lately I just have Claude build most things in Rust, it's really amazing. I tried Go, but I found it wasn't as good--Rust really does to me feel like Python. That said, it still struggles with the same class of errors of building complex systems. I've tried using TLA+, Alloy, and other things but haven't found the trick yet. The best I've found is reimplementing all external systems in memory and e2e testing everything extensively, without reimplementing the tests become unusably slow, and Claude can rewrite huge surface areas with ease--it's somewhere between mocking and literally just reimplementing the external systems.
stevefan1999 12 hours ago||
Really controversial but my honest opinion: That's because programming languages, and its natural language counterpart, too, are nowadays increasing and more likely in becoming a political tool, rather than itself being a tech tool.

I observed this through observation of the attacks to Rust due to the huge presence of LGBT people.

Now while I'm pretty much straight myself, I don't reject LGBT people and don't want to partake in identity politics.

I just want things that works no matter what background you have, yet there are some people attacking Rust because of its inclusiveness nature.

And just like Linux is being perceived as nerdy and geeky and "gaming socks ready", the tokenization of things, and there attaching political meanings to it, are quickly coming to everything, so perhaps I'm too general here as well.

Let's say it is not political, but definitely adding more meanings to its technical origin and nature

jiriknesl 5 hours ago||
Most of the attacks on Rust, I have seen, have nothing in common what people are implementing Rust.

It has a lot in common with the fact Rust is very low level language, a direct C++ competitor, and many people use it for apps that could be easily implemented in much higher languages and run fast enough.

A driver or kernel extension in Rust? No problem. A todolist SaaS startup with no users? It's better to use Rails, Django, or Laravel for that.

Mashimo 10 hours ago|||
> I observed this through observation of the attacks to Rust due to the huge presence of LGBT people.

Never seen that before, but then again I'm not in the rust community.

> don't want to partake in identity politics.

If you write Rust, or let AI write rust, do you have to partake in the identity politics?

The internet is full of memes and jokes on how shitty Java and Java Script. Yet it came never up at work. Never stopped me from writing java.

Just like Emacs vs Vim, I'm just using Nano. Never had any discussion IRL. And at work everyone uses Idea.

It's hard for me to see writing Rust somehow gets you into partaking in identity politics. Did that actually happen to you, or something that you are afraid of?

Ygg2 9 hours ago||
> Never seen that before, but then again I'm not in the rust community.

As a straight guy, number of times people attacked Rust for catering to "that crowd", "DEI-language", and "woke mind-virus" has been pretty huge on Xitter.

Which is always hilarious to me, since language itself doesn't have anything offensive.

> If you write Rust, or let AI write rust, do you have to partake in the identity politics?

Answer is of course no. However by choosing to write it you'll be perceived as anti-Zig, anti-C, pro-woke, etc.

Mashimo 9 hours ago||
Fascinating.

> However by choosing to write it you'll be perceived as anti-Zig, anti-C, pro-woke, etc.

I don't even know what zig or C is. (Please don't tell me) Edit: Oh, C the language. From context I thought it was short for something on the anti-woke site :)

But who is checking what language you are vibe coding at? And does it matter to you that those people perceive you as anti-zig?

There is probably someone on Xitter who thinks me not using VIM is just plane wrong, but that has no influence on me. To be completely honest, this all sounds like a non-issue.

I mean there is also an anti-ai crowed (r/antiai) but who cares what people on the internet think?

thefounder 12 hours ago||
Why we have discussions about sexual orientation on programming languages? Could this really go any worse?
stevefan1999 11 hours ago||
I won't say it is just because of sexual orientation, but more because of the identity politics associated with it.

Not just like "what kind of gender people I like" this kind of oversimplification but it's more about your attitude towards gender stereotypes and roles, for that's what I saw in a more deep connotation.

dizhn 8 hours ago||
In my experience Python is fine. However both Go and Flutter(Rust) are better due to the tools that are available, especially the compilers. Flutter in particular surprises me with how good LLMs are at it. Both might actually be thanks to good documentation. Maybe that they are not VERY fragmented and don't have a lot of baggage.

Frontend CSS/HTML is pretty bad though. Although they can work, it takes a lot of pushing. It's probably normal since they do not actually have eyes yet.

schmookeeg 19 hours ago||
I assume this is why things like PyO3 are popping up? If so, sort of a fascinating way to compartmentalize new rust code into legacy .py code in lieu of a refactor, or at least, a way to do a staggered refactor and eat the elephant in bites :)
thefounder 12 hours ago||
So he includes Go in a list of languages that apparently makes development slow and have “a build system that fought you” and then says python was the solution for all that. I think he got it backwards. I have found the Python build system horrific and broken by default while Go just works.
doublesocket 10 hours ago||
Why stop at getting AI to write Rust? If everything is vibe coded and code is no longer reviewed, get an LLM to devise its own ultra terse, super dense language intended solely for minimal token use and speed.

/s... sort of

haspok 10 hours ago||
Why stop at writing code? We should all build our custom ASIC chips, or if you don't have a chip fab, at least do FPGA!
ccimmergreen 10 hours ago||
so in other words... simply binary?
doublesocket 10 hours ago||
Maybe we can skip the compiler...
caturopath 8 hours ago||
Other correctly point out it does matter what language the code is in since the human does sometimes need to read and understand it.

But also, I suspect the article is just wrong. "The hard languages got easy first" isn't true in practice and the impressive examples given are not representative or as magical as the poster makes them out to be.

The takeaway might be right in the end, but the post isn't right in the beginning.

nextlevelwizard 11 hours ago||
Because there is no negatives, only positives.

I can maintain the Python code myself and I can execute it everywhere.

If I let my LLM write in Rust then when things break I am out of luck. Also Rust needs to be compiled which means I can't just share the code as freely.

linsomniac 11 hours ago|
>I can maintain the Python code myself and I can execute it everywhere. [and share it more easily]

Python can be kind of a pain in the butt to execute everywhere because of libraries. I thought uv script headers and she-bang was going to fix a lot of that, but I'm still running into issues (machines firewalled off, uv can't grab the deps. I have some code that just doesn't seem to work in uv on a Mac...). And for sharing code once the code splits out into multiple files and modules, sharing the code starts looking like sharing any code.

Don't think I'm a Python detractor; I'm a PSF Fellow, I love Python, and Claude has been writing quite good python for a while here. But I just tried a serious project with Claude writing golang (an apt proxy/cache that is resilient against upstream DDoSes, a fairly complex piece of software), and I must say it did a fantastic job. I end up with an executable I can easily run and copy around.

I'm still going to be using python for a lot, but I can definitely see myself having Claude write golang for more things in the future.

tom_ 15 hours ago||
Well don't ask us. If AI writes your code, why not ask it? You could probably make it write a whole article for ya.
tabbott 12 hours ago|
I think the author misunderstands what is good about Python.

One of the big strengths of Python is legibility: most developers find it easy to read and understand.

If you are planning to have humans verify the code you're using in production, to confirm it implements your intent, the readability of the code you are producing is important.

Performance is valuable, but for a lot of code, performance is less important than correctness and ease of verifying it.

If you are imagining your codebase being one where nobody but Claude reads the code, you might as well do Rust for the better performance. But I don't think a lot of organizations are doing that.

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