6 ms·

Isn't a lot of server code these days small programs that just pull data out of a database and feed it to an HHTPS response? It seems like it's a pretty good o

• kaba0 4y ago
  But then why go? You can also implement that logic in a likely much more readable way in Python (as at that point performance doesn’t matter), or just write the whole thing in Java/C#/Scala/Kotlin whatever, which in my opinion are more expressive for business logic.
  • paskozdilar 4y ago
    Go is much faster than Python, uses less memory, and compiles down to a statically-linked native binary, making containerization trivial. And (IMHO) it's even more readable than Python - nowdays Python code is as easily turned into an unreadable mess as Java or C# code. Just try reading Python standard library and Go standard library - the difference is monumental.
    • kaba0 4y ago
      We are talking about business logic. The infrastructure is already in a lower level language, so the performance is not a concern. And we will have to disagree on C#/Java/Python being unreadable mess. In my experience all 3 can be written in a really well maintainable way. I don’t have much experience with Go, but out of these, I would vote for it as the least maintainable (as just because each line is trivial to understand, doesn’t make the whole program flow easy to read. Otherwise why not just write assembly, every line is even more trivial there)
      • skohan 4y ago
        Performance is always a concern. For instance, if running a python interpreter introduces latency for each request, that can add up to perceptively worse performance when applied throughout a product.
      • paskozdilar 4y ago
        > In my experience all 3 can be written in a really well maintainable way. That's true, but that is generally true of any (non-toy) language. But in the modern world of rapid development, it matters how hard is it to write code in a non-maintainable way - i.e. how well it tolerates modifications by different people. And to me, it seems easier to write readable code in Go than it is to write unreadable code. It seems to come from the lack of features - Java, Python and C# have too many features, and any problem can be solved in N different ways, each one with its own warts. If you want to work on a wide range of codebases, you have to know each one of the approaches and their warts and footguns. Meanwhile, Go feels like it really reached the "there should be one obvious way to do it" ideal of Python, while Python has over the years evolved into something more Perl-like. Want to build a concurrent application? Chose your tradeoff - either you get CPU scalability (multiprocessing) but lose memory sharing, or you get a simple concurrent model (threading) that isn't scalable, or you get I/O scalability (asyncio) at the cost of function coloring, error-proneness and a single-threadedness. Go solved the whole thing with the goroutine model - internally it multiplexes coroutines onto a set of OS threads, but all blocking calls are wrapped by Go runtime which makes every coroutine behave and feel like an ordinary thread, without the massive memory use of OS threads.
        • kaba0 4y ago
          Could you expand a bit on why do you think Java has too many features? It is a very small language, that is often berated because it picks up features way too slowly if anything. I would go as far to claim that Java is an easier language than Go, or at least in the same ballpark.
          • paskozdilar 4y ago
            > Could you expand a bit on why do you think Java has too many features? I think you're asking for technical details, but I'm afraid I don't know Java well enough to do an objective comparison. I'll try with a subjective explanation or why I think so. I've learned Go in 20 minutes following the Go Tour. Few months later, I feel like there isn't a single thing I don't know about Go. It's dead simple. When I open a Go repository, it's easy for me to get into the codebase, as all code is more-or-less the same. I've learned Java back in high school, and to this day I don't feel like I "know" the language. I've tried reading some Java repositories, and every time I feel like there's some kind of friction - some implicit knowledge about it that I just don't understand. Maybe it's just me, and I haven't spent enough time learning Java. But then again, I've spent even less time learning Go, and yet I have a much easier time using it. That's what I mean by "a very small language".
  • pclmulqdq 4y ago
    In my experience, Python is far less readable than languages like go. The information density and semantic whitespace of Python really hurts readability.
    • Sinidir 4y ago
      How does the whitespace hurt readability when basically every styleguide and linter in other languages indents code blocks?