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Comment by miki123211 | Hacker News Reader

3 reasons why Python is much better than JS for this IMO.

1. Large built-in standard library (CSV, sqlite3, xml/json, zipfile).

2. In Python, whatever the LLM is likely to do will probably work. In JS, you have the Node / Deno split, far too many libraries that do the same thing (XMLHTTPRequest / Axios / fetch), many mutually-incompatible import syntaxes (E.G. compare tsx versus Node's native ts execution), and features like top-level await (very important for small scripts, and something that an LLM is likely to use!), which only work if you pray three times on the day of the full moon.

3. Much better ecosystem for data processing (particularly csv/pandas), partially resulting from operator overloading being a thing.

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> In JS, you have the Node / Deno split,

You do? Deno is maybe a single digit percentage of the market, just hyped tremendously.

> E.G. compare tsx versus Node's native ts execution

JSX/TSX, despite what React people might want you to believe, are not part of the language.

> which only work if you pray three times on the day of the full moon.

It only doesn't work in some contexts due to legacy reasons. Otherwise it's just elaborate syntax sugar for `Promise`.

> JSX/TSX, despite what React people might want you to believe, are not part of the language.

Similarly: TypeScript, despite what Node people might want you to believe, is not part of the JavaScript language.

People have to look into Typescript as a JavaScript linter and a babel replacement, nothing else.

In fact, the team has back pedaled into trying to make its own thing like in the early days.

Yes. As pointed out by someone else I misunderstood and it's the other tsx they were talking about.

I've always used ts-node, so I forgot about tsx's existence, but still those are just tools used for convenience.

Nothing currently actually runs TypeScript natively and the blessed way was always to compile it to JS and run that.

> JSX/TSX, despite what React people might want you to believe, are not part of the language.

I think you misunderstood this. tsx in this context is/was a way to run typescript files locally without doing tsc yourself first, ie make them run like a script. You can just use Node now, but for a long time it couldn’t natively run typescript files.

The only limitation I run into using Node natively is you need to do import types as type imports, which I doubt would be an issue in practice for agents.

Yes, thank you for pointing that out. Forgot that there's a another thing named "tsx" out there.

I wouldn't call it running TS natively - what they're doing is either using an external tool, or just stripping types, so several things, like most notably enums, don't work by default.

I mean, that's more than enough for my use cases and I'm happy that the feature exists, but I don't think we'll ever see a native TypeScript engine. Would have been cool, though, considering JS engines define their own internal types anyway.

In Python you also have plenty of implementations to choose from, incidentally many of them have evem better performance than CPython.

>In Python, whatever the LLM is likely to do will probably work.

Do you not realize how this sounds?

>many mutually-incompatible import syntaxes

Do you think there are 22 competing package managers in python because the package/import system "just works"?

> Do you think there are 22 competing package managers in python because the package/import system "just works"?

There aren't; a large fraction of tools people mention in this context aren't actually package managers and don't try to be package managers. Sometimes people even conflate standards and config files with tools. It's really amazing how much FUD there is around it.

But more importantly, there is no such thing as "the package/import system". Packaging is one thing, and the language's import system is a completely different thing.

And none of that actually bears on the LLM's ability to choose libraries and figure out language syntax and APIs. For that matter, you don't have to let it set up the environment (or change your existing setup) if you don't want to.

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