alt Hacker NewsI 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.