Curious, has it been proven that typed languages are easier for LLMs to work with as they dont have to infer types?

Do they infer anything? Correct me if I'm wrong but having the types right there in the source for training data just means more context.

▲

benreesman 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I'm not aware of any rigorous study on it, but my personal anecdote is that I don't even bother with Claude Code or similar unless the language is Haskell, the deployment is Nix, the config is Dhall, and I did property tests. Once you set it up like that you just pour money in until its too much money or its stuck, and thats how far LLMs can go now.

I used to yell at Claude Code when it tried to con me with mocks to get the TODO scratched off, now I laugh at the little bastard when it tries to pull a fast one on -Werror.

Nice try Claude Code, but around here we come to work or we call in sick, so what's it going to be?

▲

herrington_d 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

There are researches backing some sort of "typed language is better for LLM". Like https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.09246, Type-Constrained Code Generation with Language Models, where LLM's output is constrainted by type checkers.

Also https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.03283, Enhancing Repository-Level Code Generation with Integrated Contextual Information, uses staic analyzers to produce prompts with more context info.

Yet, the argument does directly translate to the conclusion that typed language is rigorously better for LLM without external tools. However, typed language and its static analysis information do seem to help LLM.

	▲	vidarh 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Dynamically typed languages are far from "untyped". Though they may well require more effort to analyze from scratch without making assumptions, there is nothing inherently preventing type-constrained code generation of the kind the first paper proposes even without static typing. A system doing type-constrained code-generation can certainly implement its own static type system by tracking a type for variables it uses and ensuring those constraints are maintained without actually emitting the type checks and annotations. Similarly, static analyzers can be - and have been - applied to dynamically typed languages, though if these projects have been written using typical patterns of dynamic languages the types can get very complex, so this tends to work best with code-bases written for it.

▲

cultofmetatron 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

this is just the kind of sass I needed today. cheers!