SOURCE-LINKED INTELLIGENCE

Rethinking Pivot Programming Languages in Code Language Models

arXiv · AI, language, vision and robotics · article · Sep 19, 2026 · UTC

Multilingual code language models transfer skills across programming languages (PLs), but whether any PL occupies a privileged pivot position remains contested: geometric analyses point to C-family languages and Go, while behavioral evidence highlights Python. We revisit this question under controls for representational anisotropy and length variation across PLs, two confounds that compromise prior cosine-based analyses. Across three code models on multilingual competitive-programming data, we study three views of cross-PL organization: pairwise PL geometry, PL-English alignment, and pivoted r

Read original source ↗ Open in workspace

recordType

paper

region

Global