As a counter argument - I assume that Anthropic is using AI to write Claude Code.

I've read and heard in videos that Javascript is a pretty good language for AI to write code in. Apparently this is because there is so much training data out there. Also Javascript avoids problems of multi threading and memory management that can mess up the AI in other "more performant" languages.

So maybe Javascript is not the worst choice for writing software fast with AI

I feel like a year ago JavaScript and Python were the best languages for coding agents to use because of their heavier presence in the training data, but I'm not sure that's true any more now.

The latest frontier models are competent at Rust and Swift and all manner of other less widely used languages.

The more important factor is how good they language's compiler is at kicking out actionable error messages, since one-shot code generation isn't as important once you have a coding agent loop.

Sometimes I think that if we are willing to burn tokens and rely on compilers in a loop we should be using languages that can catch as many errors as possible at compile time.

Like Ada or Ocaml or Haskell or something.

Or even require like MC / DC testing or MISRA C verification.

Or even some of the languages that apply Hoare checks, like Ada SPARK or FRAMA-C or VALE or whatever.

I don't have the budget to test how that would work but it seems interesting.

I presume haskell applications similar to claude code are well represented in the training data.

There was a post recently from a guy who used Haskell with AI agents. If I remember correctly he said the type checking did catch errors. The problem was the compiler was very slow, which slowed down the feedback loop and output. I think he switched to Python.