moritz
There aren’t many comparative benchmarks, and obviously the design of such a benchmark is difficult, but, e.g. https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.09101
In this benchmark, models can correctly solve Rust problems 61% on first pass — A far cry from other languages such as C# (88%) or Elixir (97%, no static typing whatsoever).
Maybe thats why one of the not-so-bad ideas how to go about distributed systems came from a guy who was trained as a physicist and used to complain to his fellow programmers that “a lot of systems actually break the laws of physics”[1]?
> In distributed systems there is no real shared state (imagine one machine in the USA another in Sweden) where is the shared state? In the middle of the Atlantic? - shared state breaks laws of physics. State changes are propagated at the speed of light - we always know how things were at a remote site not how they are now. What we know is what they last told us. If you make a software abstraction that ignores this fact you’ll be in trouble.[2]
[1]: “The Mess We’re In”, 2014 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lKXe3HUG2l4 [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19708900
Just the first 2 chapters (~30p) + the Conclusion (~10p) contain a lot of useful food for thought.
[no, not that gemini]
Win was conceived as a modifier reserved for the OS (not to be used by applications), while command never was. Command is for commands. If you come to the Mac from Win or Linux it often helps to think of command as what ctrl does on those systems. Ctrl on the Mac started as Terminal-Emulator specific modifier— Which to this day is great, because your universal copy shortcut (cmd-c) and interrupt (ctrl-c) are different things.
Indeed one would map win to command, but only because you need another key for a modifier that‘s not ctrl or opt/alt, conceptually they are different
In this benchmark, models can correctly solve Rust problems 61% on first pass — A far cry from other languages such as C# (88%) or Elixir (a “buggy dynamic language”) where they perform best (97%).
I wonder why that is, it’s quite surprising. Obviously details of their benchmark design matter, but this study doesn’t support your claims.
“Why Elixir is the best language for AI” https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46900241
- for comparison of the arguments made
- features a bit more actual data than “intuitions” compared to OP
- interesting to think about in an agent context specifically is runtime introspection afforded by the BEAM (which, out of how it developed, has always been very important in that world) - the blog post has a few notes on that as well
> In distributed systems there is no real shared state (imagine one machine in the USA another in Sweden) where is the shared state? In the middle of the Atlantic? - shared state breaks laws of physics. State changes are propagated at the speed of light - we always know how things were at a remote site not how they are now. What we know is what they last told us. If you make a software abstraction that ignores this fact you’ll be in trouble.[2]
[1]: “The Mess We’re In”, 2014 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lKXe3HUG2l4
mix phx.gen.html Accounts User users name:string email:stringMirowski, Philip. 2020. “The Neoliberal Ersatz Nobel Prize”. Pp. 219-254 in Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, edited by Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian and Philip Mirowski. Verso. Fulltext: https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/215796/1/Full-text-b...
Those languages happen to be "imperative"? – the few backend devs I know who at least sort of vibe with CSS are all used to declarative programming. I think that might be at least one of the reasons?
My students at university (Gen Z) have no concept of the “file system”.
After Procter & Gamble bought them in 2005, it now mostly exists as a brand to be licensed (everything other than shaving and electric toothbrushes).
[1] https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/nuscale-power-uamps-...