Rethinking Pivot Programming Languages in Code Language Models

Abstract: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 retrieval through candidate PL representation spaces. The results are relation-dependent. Code-code geometry reveals structured language regions but no universal center; code-English alignment favors high-level scripting languages; and pivoted retrieval favors different intermediate spaces for code-to-code and English-to-code transfer. These findings suggest that Python's special role is better understood as English-facing affinity than as universal geometric centrality.

Computation and Language (cs.CL)

arXiv:2609.22988 [cs.CL]

(or arXiv:2609.22988v1 [cs.CL] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.22988 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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