Other Support

[chatbots]

No offense intended, suggested or implied to Python developers. However, a well known issue with Python, is that once developers learn Python, they tend to not want to learn anything else other than Python. And they are the first to proudly admit that.

Very simply and politely, Python is a good choice for A.I. but there are plenty of very successful A.I. projects written in programming languages other than Python, that would benefit from adding improved support for programming languages other than Python to OpenAI products such as ChatGPT.

C++, PHP, and Perl, to name a few, are popular choices for existing A.I. projects. For example: ChatScript is written in C++, AIML is popular in PHP/MySQL. Perl has some really interesting A.I. projects. I hope to be among the first developers to support GPT-4 in programming languages other than Python.

[simse]

was this written by a generative AI?

[jonathanagustin]

@chatbots,

There's tradeoffs with Python for sure. Python is generally easy to understand, and this allows for more people to contribute. You don't need to pay attention to pointers and memory, unlike C++. However, one tradeoff is that implementing concurrency is more complex in Python due to its Global Interpreter Lock (GIL). Golang appears to be better suited for concurrency because it is built-in as a first-class citizen with goroutines and channels.

The programming language of choice is a design decision and depends on the aim and values of the project. I speculate that OpenAI is trying to make evals as accessible as possible because they want to maximize contributions.

Assuming that it is true that Python developers tend not to learn other languages, OpenAI has no required duty or responsibility to guide open-source engineers to be conducive to other programming languages. It would be nice if they did, but they are not required to do so. If someone learns Python and chooses to not learn other languages, then that is their choice and their detriment.

I do think that supporting other languages would be good for the project, and it would make it more accessible to others without a Python background. That said, supporting more languages does not appear to be best at this stage of development. Doing a cost-benefit analysis, I'm guessing that if OpenAI allocated resources to support other languages in this stage of development, it would not maximize contributions. Python appears to be the language that will achieve this aim.