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Unpopular opinion, writing Go is faster than Python. With the compiler, strong typing, and no versioning hell, I'm much more productive in Go. Whenever I use p

Unpopular opinion, writing Go is faster than Python. With the compiler, strong typing, and no versioning hell, I'm much more productive in Go. Whenever I use python I run into problems with versions and dependencies. And the whole community just tells me to use pyenv or virtualenv and it will "fix all my issues". Only it doesn't.

milofeynman 7y ago
I doubt that's unpopular. It's the same reason I significantly prefer Go over Ruby.
kart23 7y ago
For larger stuff, yes. For small stuff, no. If you just need to get something small done quick and dirty, python will be easier and faster.
- jerf 7y ago
  Yes. My current estimate of the cutover, for myself, is about three weeks of solid, 40hour/week development. After that, my Python (or other dynamic language) starts the process of seizing up, where instead of rewriting some module I just put a little hack in there to make it backwards compatible with other code, since I haven't got a great way of being quite sure what's calling this code, so I use a __setitem__ or have a function that takes "a thing or an array of that thing", and I find myself increasingly reluctant to refactor the Python. YMMV on the exact number, but that's been my experience several times now. I know it can be done; I've seen it done, I've done it myself. But refactoring without even the rudimentary static type system Go has just becomes an increasing nightmare at scale. And I use unit testing in Python, etc. But, flipside, yes, Go isn't a great language for just bashing a script together in. Maybe not the worst, with a bit of library work, but not a great language.
watermelon0 7y ago
Just as a counterpoint, I'd say that using Python can IMHO be similarly productive than Go. Regarding the dependencies, you have tools on top of virtualenv, such as pipenv/poentry, which handle dependencies, and are easy to use. Biggest issue that I've encountered would probably be when two or more dependencies require the same package, with no intersect between supported versions. I don't think Go handle this any better, thought. Type hints (and mypy for static type checking) are a must, and coupled with a good IDE, they really improve the productivity. I'd say that mypy's type system is more advanced than Go's, but it strongly lacks in type safety (due to the fact that majority of the libraries are not taking advantage of it yet, and that Python is still a dynamic language by its nature, and there is no runtime type checking).
saila 7y ago
The recommendation should be to use pyenv and virtualenv: pyenv for installing the Python versions you need for different projects and virtualenv for creating an isolated environment for each project. Using this setup, I almost never run into dependency issues. I don't know much about Go. How does it avoid dependency conflicts?
abraxas 7y ago
All these great things that Java fossils like myself have been telling Node and Ruby hipsters about. Of course they won't be caught dead writing in a language their parents use.
pm90 7y ago
Same. Moved from Python to Go, don’t write python much anymore. It’s ridiculously easy to build things in go. The default tooling works just great. It’s a nice fit with docker for building tiny containers. Perhaps the nicest thing though is how easy it is to write fast http servers. The default server is pretty good, but there are also so many choices for faster http server frameworks. Middle wares are easy to write and share. I can’t say that I truly understood how http servers worked until I started using go.
ElonMuskrat 7y ago
I just cannot understand how rational engineers would choose untyped languages like Python or Ruby for large scale systems. Humans make mistakes - even very smart humans make frequent mistakes - and blast radius grows with the size of the system.

milofeynman 7y ago

I doubt that's unpopular. It's the same reason I significantly prefer Go over Ruby.

kart23 7y ago

For larger stuff, yes. For small stuff, no. If you just need to get something small done quick and dirty, python will be easier and faster.

jerf 7y ago
Yes. My current estimate of the cutover, for myself, is about three weeks of solid, 40hour/week development. After that, my Python (or other dynamic language) starts the process of seizing up, where instead of rewriting some module I just put a little hack in there to make it backwards compatible with other code, since I haven't got a great way of being quite sure what's calling this code, so I use a __setitem__ or have a function that takes "a thing or an array of that thing", and I find myself increasingly reluctant to refactor the Python. YMMV on the exact number, but that's been my experience several times now. I know it can be done; I've seen it done, I've done it myself. But refactoring without even the rudimentary static type system Go has just becomes an increasing nightmare at scale. And I use unit testing in Python, etc. But, flipside, yes, Go isn't a great language for just bashing a script together in. Maybe not the worst, with a bit of library work, but not a great language.

watermelon0 7y ago

Just as a counterpoint, I'd say that using Python can IMHO be similarly productive than Go. Regarding the dependencies, you have tools on top of virtualenv, such as pipenv/poentry, which handle dependencies, and are easy to use. Biggest issue that I've encountered would probably be when two or more dependencies require the same package, with no intersect between supported versions. I don't think Go handle this any better, thought. Type hints (and mypy for static type checking) are a must, and coupled with a good IDE, they really improve the productivity. I'd say that mypy's type system is more advanced than Go's, but it strongly lacks in type safety (due to the fact that majority of the libraries are not taking advantage of it yet, and that Python is still a dynamic language by its nature, and there is no runtime type checking).

saila 7y ago

The recommendation should be to use pyenv and virtualenv: pyenv for installing the Python versions you need for different projects and virtualenv for creating an isolated environment for each project. Using this setup, I almost never run into dependency issues. I don't know much about Go. How does it avoid dependency conflicts?

abraxas 7y ago

All these great things that Java fossils like myself have been telling Node and Ruby hipsters about. Of course they won't be caught dead writing in a language their parents use.

pm90 7y ago

Same. Moved from Python to Go, don’t write python much anymore. It’s ridiculously easy to build things in go. The default tooling works just great. It’s a nice fit with docker for building tiny containers. Perhaps the nicest thing though is how easy it is to write fast http servers. The default server is pretty good, but there are also so many choices for faster http server frameworks. Middle wares are easy to write and share. I can’t say that I truly understood how http servers worked until I started using go.

ElonMuskrat 7y ago

I just cannot understand how rational engineers would choose untyped languages like Python or Ruby for large scale systems. Humans make mistakes - even very smart humans make frequent mistakes - and blast radius grows with the size of the system.