What's the best programming language for coding agents?
This article explores the relationship between programming language syntax and LLM token efficiency for coding agents. It discusses findings that suggest concise, dynamically typed languages may be more cost-effective for AI-driven development than static languages.
Why it matters
As AI coding agents become more prevalent, optimizing code for token efficiency could significantly reduce operational costs and latency for developers.
This somewhat widely cited post (I keep seeing it cited, anyway) suggests that dynamic languages and/or languages that represent things more concisely are more token efficient. It seems to be cited enough that LLM search results agree. For example, when I searched for "dynamic vs static language token cost" (no quotes), Google's AI summary opened with
Dynamically typed languages generally have a lower LLM token cost than traditional statically typed languages because omitting explicit type declarations makes the code more compact.
Google's AI cited the same post, which suggests that some concise dynamic languages have maybe 1/2 to 1/3 the token cost of static languages like Rust, Go, C++, etc. The author says
There was a very meaningful gap of 2.6x between C (the least token efficient language I compared) and Clojure (the most efficient).
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