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My personal takeaway in a broader context is that Go code is pretty boring, predictable and repetitive as opposed to clever and customised, therefore in theory
by Cthulhu_ 2y ago
My personal takeaway in a broader context is that Go code is pretty boring, predictable and repetitive as opposed to clever and customised, therefore in theory LLMs can more easily predict and generate said code. It's a tradeoff, Go can be more verbose because it's not as expressive, but using the right tooling, that labor/toil is reduced.
- moffkalast 2y agoThe older the tech, the more training data should be available for it (assuming it's still being used today), ergo LLMs will be a lot better at it. They ought to be way better at Cpp or JS than Golang in that sense.
- pyrale 2y agoFortran is so back in business!
- WJW 2y agoI don't think this is true: the older the tech, the less hype it has and thus the less blog posts/example repos/etc will be available. In particular, a boring language without a strong open source culture (COBOL, say, or Oracle SQL) will probably not have a lot of training data available despite being very much in use.
- zelphirkalt 2y agoBut given the idea of the post, people should never have adopted Golang and Golang itself could never have risen to its current level of use.
- pyrale 2y agoUse a language with lots of boilerplate code so the LLM can generate more code for you?
- loa_in_ 2y agoBeing explicit without concerns about being terse is something that wasn't practical before assisted coding and that would be a realisation of some of most important tenets of computer science.
- kaba0 2y agoTerseness is not only about practicality. Even if AI writes it for me, it requires a huge deal more reading comprehension on my part to properly check it. E.g. an if err block every couple lines will actively hinder reading that code, and is an easy source for errors to hide (no, just because you check the value of err doesn't make it proper error handling).
- pyrale 2y ago> something that wasn't practical before assisted coding It still isn't practical if you read more code than you write, unless you also use a LLM to summarize the code for you.
- pcwelder 2y agoThe simplicity of golang definitely helps. Between golang and rust, chatgpt has much easier time with golang. The standard toolchain (as opposed to python packaging) makes it easier for LLM to debug and run commands. So it's easier to develop a golang based app over python using poetry or uv.