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Go + Services = One Goliath Project

engineering.khanacademy.org

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Re: Go + Services = One Goliath Project

#161

Post by idoubtit »

SomaticPirate wrote: post #126
dx87 wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From what I can tell by reading what Go developers write, they like it precisely because it's not something to get excited over. It seems like the kind of language where once you learn it, you don't have to keep up with a bunch of blog posts detailing all the cool new things being added to it, and decisions over stuff like formatting are made for you. I primarily use Rust for hobby projects, and the steady stream of…

It also lends itself to patterns in code. One thing that learned about Python coming from Perl was there was a “Pythonic” solution. Go seems to take that idea further with gofmt and a small but powerful std lib. I can typically glance at how someone is configuring their http.Server and understand the intention of the code.

The "pythonic" way was a mantra that has been obsolete for a long time. With Python, there are many (unsatisfying) ways to declare dependencies, many ways to format code (I hope "black" will prevail), many ways to format a string, many ways to create a struct/record...

The lack of quality batteries included also leads to "there is more than one way to do it" through the choice of unofficial libraries. My experience is that the extensive standard library of Go brings more normalisation.

Re: Go + Services = One Goliath Project

#162

Post by kart23 »

ngngngng wrote: post #92

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.

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.

Re: Go + Services = One Goliath Project

#163

Post by WoodTree »

StillBored wrote: post #135
dwaltrip wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They could also improve the language. Map, filter, and reduce are such fundamental concepts.

Fundamental? IMHO, they are just syntactic sugar on a foreach loop. Which in many ways is bad because it provides yet another way to express the same concept, without a significant difference in the method of execution. What am I missing?

They don’t have to be glorified for loops, even if they usually are. Map and Filter should be capable of running in parallel or asynchronously, and some languages provide this.

Re: Go + Services = One Goliath Project

#164

Post by joshuamorton »

baddox wrote: post #143
joshuamorton wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you need to express something complex enough that you can't do it in a single statement in Python, it deserves to have a name (or more likely, it already has one in the standard library).

But python for loops can and typical do have multiple lines, yet that “block” inside the for loop doesn’t have a name. The fact that the body of a for loop can have multiple lines but an anonymous function cannot is a purely arbitrary syntax limitation, and the principle you stated ought to apply (or not apply) equally to both use cases.

This doesn't follow: for loops are there specifically for cases of the complexity that can't be handled by other constructs (like comprehensions). Anonymous functions are not, for the complex cases you give the construct a name.

It's a very intentional language limitation, much as semantic whitespace is an intentional limitation.

And there is actually a language difference. A for loop is a statement. A lambda is an expression. Python doesn't let you put statements into expressions.

Re: Go + Services = One Goliath Project

#165

Post by jnwatson »

smadge wrote: post #152
smadge wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just write an implementation of map/reduce/filter for every type in your go program!

Maybe you could create some text macros to simplify the process, and then run a preprocessor on your program, and then.... uh oh.

You joke, but source code generation is the standard way to generics in go. They even have some standard hooks for it in the build system.

Re: Go + Services = One Goliath Project

#166

Post by whalesalad »

dwaltrip wrote: post #112
whalesalad wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you feel the need to use a multi line lambda you should be using a regular function. This is a code smell for sure.

Regular functions definitions can't be used as expressions. You are basically saying that one should never need a multi-line lambda. Obviously, I disagree.

> Regular functions definitions can't be used as expressions

I’m having a difficult time understanding what you mean here. Can you offer an example?

I have never felt compelled to write a multi line lambda.

Re: Go + Services = One Goliath Project

#167

Post by guitarbill »

ram_rar wrote: post #99
timwaagh wrote: post #17

Seems like such a waste. Is switching to python 3 really that hard? Is hardware that expensive? If this is indeed the right call it doesn't bode well for traditional scripting languages as the web scales to fewer high traffic apps. We might start to see more jvm, go (apparently) or even rust and c(++), rather than speed of development languages like Python or Ruby. Trend seems to be the reverse though, with python th…

Switching to python3 is hard, especially if you have a massive python codebase interacting with other systems. Its not as easy as importing unicode_literals. Unicode breaks in very subtle ways.

and rewriting it in another language will magically fix this and not introduce new bugs? besides, in my experience Python 3's clear separation between bytes and str makes these breakages much less subtle than it silently going wrong in Python 2.

i wish them all the best, but would've been much more impressed if they'd done it, not simply announced to do it.

Re: Go + Services = One Goliath Project

#168

Post by watermelon0 »

ngngngng wrote: post #92

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.

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).

Re: Go + Services = One Goliath Project

#169

Post by wbl »

adtac wrote: post #54
catalogia wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Go seems to be optimized for onboarding new developers (particularly straight out of school) quickly, rather than for the long term comfort of developers using it. There are Rob Pike quotes that speak to the first part of that at least. If I was a business owner, I'd love Go. But what I can't really figure out is why so many devs love it. It's far from the worst thing in the world, I don't hate it, but I just can't g…

Defers, channels, inexpensive goroutines, a mostly consistent standard library, very good performance, garbage collection, being similar to C, strongly typed, and readability are the reasons why I've enjoyed writing Go exclusively for the past couple of years. Almost none of these is exclusive to Go, but the intersection of all these certainly is.

You might want to try Ocaml.

Re: Go + Services = One Goliath Project

#170

Post by dangoor »

Alex3917 wrote: post #123
neurobashing wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everyone’s project/code base is different but in my experience there’s been a critical mass of libraries for a few years. I presume the “it’s hard to move to 3” is dev teams wanting a new toy as much as “the rewrite is too complex”. Library use, size of code base etc are all big factors but at the end of the day, I think team motivation is really the deciding factor.

I worked on a fairly large codebase that needed to be rewritten from scratch when migrating from 2 to 3, primarily because all the tests were written using a test framework that was no longer maintained. So given that you might need to start over anyway, I think it's reasonable to consider other options. That said, yeah it's difficult to understand how KA's web server costs aren't already basically zero, and how thei…

> That said, yeah it's difficult to understand how KA's web server costs aren't already basically zero, and how their endpoints aren't already basically instantaneous.

I find that this is the outsider's view of a great many products. Things always seem a lot simpler on the outside.

In Khan Academy's case, I think a lot of folks just think of our site as being a collection of more-or-less static pages with videos on them. There's a lot more going on than that, though. We've got a CMS that supports articles with math and interactive elements, in addition to the videos... and many, many exercises with hints. All translated into dozens of languages.

We have to remember every exercise people have done so that we know which ones to present to them next, and we need to display that progress when they look at topic pages. Oh yeah, and if they're in a classroom, we need to present that progress to teachers (or coaches/parents, outside of the classroom). Teachers can also assign content.

Now, we're also offering features for school districts: https://www.khanacademy.org/district

Plus, there's the official SAT prep, which connects to the College Board directly to provide personalized guidance about what to work on... and that's only one of the test preparation areas of our site.

And, as you can imagine, there are a bunch of other features and aspects of the features above that I'm not mentioning. It adds up.

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