logoalt Hacker News

benzible • today at 6:23 PM • 1 reply • view on HN

Another BEAM-based language, Elixir, came in first in a recent agentic coding study: https://dashbit.co/blog/why-elixir-best-language-for-ai


Replies

sczi • today at 7:47 PM

In that Tencent study less common languages got easier problems. Which explains why racket also performed suspiciously well in it. The authors recognize the problem themselves. I like elixir, but it's imo embarrassing how often elixir people cite that study despite it not actually supporting what they claim.

A much more recent and imo more realistic comparison of different languages with ai, is openai's study reimplementing sqlite in different languages: https://openai.com/index/low-resource-programming-languages/

That showed about what we expect, that popular languages like python, javascript, java, C#, etc do best, while less popular languages like Common Lisp, Ocaml, Zig, etc do slightly worse. But the difference is small enough I'd still just choose whatever language and ecosystem I know best that is appropriate for a project.