This claim needs to be backed up by evals. I could just as well argue the opposite, that LLMs are best at coding Python because there are two orders of magnitude more Python in their training sets than C++ or Rust.

In any case, you can easily get most of the benefits of typed languages by adding a rule that requires the LLM to always output Python code with type annotations and validate its output by running ruff and ty.

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yibers 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I agree that the training sets for LLMs have much more training data for Python than for Rust. But C++ has existed before Python I believe. So I doubt there is 2 orders of magnitude of Python code more than C++.

	▲	hibikir 3 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		You miss how many fewer programmers were there in the early years, how much of that code was ever public, and even if it was, how useful it was, as C++ has changed drastically since, say, what we used to write in 2001.
	▲	vidarh 3 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		It's not just a question of whether there is more actual code in a given language, but how much is available in the public and private training data. I've done work on reviewing and fine-tuning training data with a couple of providers, and the amount of Python code I got to see at least out-distanced C++ code by far more than 2 orders of magnitude. It could be a heavily biased sample, but I have no problems believing it also could be representative.

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dccsillag 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I think you vastly overestimate the capacity of Python typing.