Ask HN: Any objective research on which languages are best for AI agents? I keep reading articles that suggest that Rust or Go or some other language is optimal for AI development because of feature X or lack of issue Y. Has there been any actual head to head comparison of this using frontier models? Any benchmarks that purport to measure this? |
Conclusion: Elixir was the best (had the highest problem solve rate).
Reasons (Theo's interpretation):
- code collocation, where documentation is integrated directly within the source code
- design philosophy of a language (readability, clear idioms, and strict expectation management)
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Sources from video:
- https://github.com/Tencent-Hunyuan/AutoCodeBenchmark/tree/ma...
- https://martinalderson.com/posts/which-programming-languages...
- https://simonwillison.net/2026/Jan/19/nanolang/#atom-everyth...
I’ve seen a lot of blog posts with fairly dubious claims here with relatively flimsy evidence. And I’ve seen a few papers trying to tackle the topic. But I think it’s a very open area of research currently.