It’s funny that in your reply “this article is almost certainly intended to be read by humans” you made what is the best case to keep writing code in Python even with AI.
Sure, if you are going to have an AI do all your coding and maintenance you can use whatever language it’s best at. But if you want to participate in the writing, debugging, and maintenance, it has to be in a language that a human can read. I’m not saying that Rust or Go is unreadable, but I know I am better at Python personally and am going to keep using it until the speed penalty matters to my project, and then maybe I’ll let an AI rewrite the whole thing in a faster language.
I’ve always found Ruby to be way more readable, what keeps me using python is the depth of libraries is unmatched.
So unless you’re into burning tokens having AI generate untested libraries, I’d stick to using the most idiomatic tool for the problem you are tackling.
So, it's really interesting. We've started moving away from python libs because 25% OSS is out of date and another % is custom tweaks to the software help our use cases. In both scenarios it means our own fork.
And honestly it's not burning that many tokens if you've got an existing example lib to point to.
I'd argue that while Rust has a high barrier to writing code due to lifetimes and other type constraints, its still quite easy to read.
(Kind of the inverse of perl)
While it's a lot easier to read then Perl, it's still not as easy as something like a Python.
> But if you want to participate in the writing, debugging, and maintenance, it has to be in a language that a human can read.
I think the idea is that languages like Python and JavaScript make it easier for humans to write the initial implementation, whereas the "hard" languages from the perspective of creating the minimum viable product are the ones that make it easier for humans to maintain the code, and this has historically been a major trade off.
Whereas if you have the AI write the initial implementation...
> I know I am better at Python personally and am going to keep using it until the speed penalty matters to my project,
I hate Python (app distribution is painful), but will still reach for it before I reach for Go. Rust doesn't even enter the equation.
I would not have even needed to reach for Go in about half my programs if Python had mandatory typing and single-file no-dep distribution.
> and then maybe I’ll let an AI rewrite the whole thing in a faster language.
Even then, my reasons for discarding Python when I do discard it is almost never "performance", it's because the problem space requires mandatory typing for complex data types, or concurrency, or easy distribution.
Of course, this requires me to figure out quite early ion a project that those things would be needed.
Did you read the article? I think you're arguing against a strawman.
I did read the article and I’m not arguing against a straw man. If you’re going to let an AI agent do everything for you then go ahead and use Rust (or any language with a strong type system that benefits agents).
But if I’m participating then I’m going to use Python because it’s easier to read.
If there’s anything that I’m arguing against is the author’s claim that the ecosystem of libraries (regardless of whether they are a wrapper) and readability don’t matter anymore. I’d say that in a lot of smaller teams it still matters. We’re not all using AI to ship slop. A lot of us are using AI to work on our ideas for our hobbies or for research. And it’s not fulfilling unless I get to be involved in the process.
But it's not talking about people like you. It's like getting mad at someone suggesting selling their car for a self-driving car, but you ride a bike everywhere. Take a breather and recognize that not every article is personally meant for you or your situation.
And this isn't even a defense of the premise. I'm not using AI to generate assembly code, because I don't know assembly.