It's mostly a matter of what one is comfortable with. Generally
speaking, the people who prefer Coq have coded in Coq and the people
who prefer Agda have coded in Agda. You're undoubtedly familiar with
the relative advantages and disadvantages of the two in general (e.g.
tactic proofs versus proof-terms with holes, typical ambiguity versus
explicit universe polymorphism), which apply just as well when doing
HoTT. Historically, there have been a few issues with one or the
other specific to HoTT, but most or all of them are no longer
relevant.
1. It used to be the case that higher inductive types could be faked
better in Agda; Dan Licata invented a trick using private types that
could be used to get HITs with judgmental computation rules for
point-constructors (as are used in the book). This didn't used to be
possible in Coq, but more recently it's been hacked to support a
similar mechanism. So as long as you use the version of Coq
suggested/required by the HoTT Coq library, there is no difference
here any more.
2. Coq's rules for universes and its treatment of the special universe
"Prop" (in particular, singleton elimination) didn't used to be
(obviously) compatible with univalence. This has also been mostly
fixed by patches implementing a new flag -indices-matter.
3. Coq's typical ambiguity didn't used to be flexible enough to
support some of the stuff we want to do with universes in HoTT, but
Mathieu has recently implemented better universe polymorphism.
4. By default, Agda allows a sort of pattern-matching that is not
compatible with univalence (it allows you to prove axiom K). There is
now a flag --without-K which modifies Agda's pattern-matching so that
it no longer allows you to prove axiom K in the obvious way. However,
no one has proven that Agda using --without-K *is* compatible with
univalence, and I think people still occasionally find issues with it
that need to be fixed. (So --without-K should really be called
--without-all-the-incompatibilities-with-univalence-that-we've-thought-of-so-far.)
However, in practice this is not really a problem: it's pretty easy
to restrict your coding style to only use pattern-matching as
syntactic sugar for the induction principle, the way the book does.
Mike
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