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> Golang is like Python [...] Fast to implement, easy to read I disagree. Python is often described as "executable pseudocode" - for example, to delete the `i`

by pansa2 6y ago

> Golang is like Python [...] Fast to implement, easy to read I disagree. Python is often described as "executable pseudocode" - for example, to delete the `i`th element from a list `a` you use `del a[i]`. In Go, it's much more convoluted: `a = append(a[:i], a[i+1:]...)`. Plus, without generics, you can't even easily hide that inside a function! There's a whole page of these "tricks" that are necessary to perform basic operations on slices: https://github.com/golang/go/wiki/SliceTricks https://github.com/golang/go/wiki/SliceTricks

amscanne 6y ago
Interesting. I didn’t know you could do that in python with a list. It would be trivial for Go to support the delete keyword on slices (mapping to the statement you noted), but I think it would be a bad idea. Sometimes you want an operation to be awkward intentionally because it’s fundamentally costly. Hiding that cost by making everything look the same doesn’t always help the programmer. Languages should be powerful, but there should be an intuitive relationship between the code the computational complexity (not exact, but intuitive). I’m sure there are counter examples, but I think Go generally does a good job at this. Plain loops are standard, make, append, new, delete, etc. have obvious costs. Error handling is explicit.
solidasparagus 6y ago
Yeah, Python is much much more readable than Go. I feel like performance focused languages are always less readable because the language needs to give you more control and I think Golang lets you work at a pretty high level of abstraction while still having plenty of control on performance. Once you know Go, it's pretty easy to read someone else's code, which I think is really nice. But "easy to read" might have been a little bit of a stretch.
pansa2 6y ago
> `a = append(a[:i], a[i+1:]...)` Not only is this ugly and unintuitive (“what function do I call to delete an element?”; “append”), according to the linked page it can also cause a memory leak?!
- pasabagi 6y ago
  On the other hand, it's very clear about what's actually happening when you delete an element of an array. I'm not a C guy, but I figure doing this in C would involve several lines of mmemove, with loads of error checking[1]. So the Go version is about as ergonomic as you can get without obscuring what's going on. [1] - I guess you'd do something like: memmove(a+i+1, a+i, sizeof(element) * (a->len - i)) with a whole load of checks to make sure everything's in order. I think C has the advantage of being utterly explicit about what is actually happening, but I think a higher level thing like append() is kind of nice when you don't want to think hard about, say, inserting an element in the middle of an array.

by pansa2 6y ago

amscanne 6y ago

Interesting. I didn’t know you could do that in python with a list. It would be trivial for Go to support the delete keyword on slices (mapping to the statement you noted), but I think it would be a bad idea. Sometimes you want an operation to be awkward intentionally because it’s fundamentally costly. Hiding that cost by making everything look the same doesn’t always help the programmer. Languages should be powerful, but there should be an intuitive relationship between the code the computational complexity (not exact, but intuitive). I’m sure there are counter examples, but I think Go generally does a good job at this. Plain loops are standard, make, append, new, delete, etc. have obvious costs. Error handling is explicit.

solidasparagus 6y ago

Yeah, Python is much much more readable than Go. I feel like performance focused languages are always less readable because the language needs to give you more control and I think Golang lets you work at a pretty high level of abstraction while still having plenty of control on performance. Once you know Go, it's pretty easy to read someone else's code, which I think is really nice. But "easy to read" might have been a little bit of a stretch.

pansa2 6y ago

> `a = append(a[:i], a[i+1:]...)` Not only is this ugly and unintuitive (“what function do I call to delete an element?”; “append”), according to the linked page it can also cause a memory leak?!

pasabagi 6y ago
On the other hand, it's very clear about what's actually happening when you delete an element of an array. I'm not a C guy, but I figure doing this in C would involve several lines of mmemove, with loads of error checking[1]. So the Go version is about as ergonomic as you can get without obscuring what's going on. [1] - I guess you'd do something like: memmove(a+i+1, a+i, sizeof(element) * (a->len - i)) with a whole load of checks to make sure everything's in order. I think C has the advantage of being utterly explicit about what is actually happening, but I think a higher level thing like append() is kind of nice when you don't want to think hard about, say, inserting an element in the middle of an array.