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Learning Go as a Python Developer: The Good and the Bad

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Re: Learning Go as a Python Developer: The Good and the Bad

#41

Post by throwawaymaths »

jeremydw wrote: post #38
ActorNightly wrote: post #6

>sharing your code is even pain with colleagues even if they are using the same operating system, mainly because the Python requirement file doesn't pin dependencies, wat? Pretty sure you can use == in requirements.txt Also, its very possible, and quite easy to just include the code for the library in your package, which effectively "locks in" the version. We did this all the time when building AWS lambda deployments…

This comment section itself clearly shows how crazy dependency and environment management is in Python. In this thread alone, we've received instructions to... - poetry - "Just pin the dependencies and use Docker" - pip freeze - Vendoring in dependency code - pipreqs - virtualenv This is simply a mess and it's handled much better in other languages. I manage a small agency team and there are some weeks where I feel l…

Now try installing tensorflow. Treat yourself to ice cream if you get it to install without having to reinstall Linux and without borking the active project you're on.

Re: Learning Go as a Python Developer: The Good and the Bad

#42

Post by zozbot234 »

returningfory2 wrote: post #30

> I had heard of Go for many years, but never stuck with it; it gets constant negative press on Hacker News/Reddit I think on Hacker News it's really fashionable to criticize Go, and this has led to a culture where Go gets significantly more negativity than it deserves. As technologists, one of our most important jobs is to see through such fashions and judge languages/tools/technologies based on their actual merit.…

Go is a vastly preferable language to Python or Ruby for most things. The "negative press" is quite overstated, it does get plenty of favorable advocacy as well.

Re: Learning Go as a Python Developer: The Good and the Bad

#43

Post by morelisp »

DandyDev wrote: post #37
morelisp wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is Python significantly better in this regard? I don't think so, especially with the differentiation between modules which are directories with an __init__.py and modules which are files you import directly but if not in the same directory also still need an __init__.py which has tripped up probably 80% of the people I try to teach Python to. In Go you can at least get pretty far with a totally flat namespace and the…

Directories with an __init__.py are not modules, they are packages. Modules are .py files

The __init__.py is also itself a module, which you import by importing the package. That's confusing, and not easily avoided!

Re: Learning Go as a Python Developer: The Good and the Bad

#44

Post by 120photo »

I tried porting a Python utility I wrote to Go specifically because I did not want people to have to install any 3rd party libraries (in this case just one). If anything I had a much deeper appreciation as to how much Python does for you and just lets you work. I would still like to port someday. For now I can containerize my app but that would still require people to install docker and learn how to use docker.

Re: Learning Go as a Python Developer: The Good and the Bad

#45

Post by metadat »

zozbot234 wrote: post #42
returningfory2 wrote: post #30

> I had heard of Go for many years, but never stuck with it; it gets constant negative press on Hacker News/Reddit I think on Hacker News it's really fashionable to criticize Go, and this has led to a culture where Go gets significantly more negativity than it deserves. As technologists, one of our most important jobs is to see through such fashions and judge languages/tools/technologies based on their actual merit.…

Go is a vastly preferable language to Python or Ruby for most things. The "negative press" is quite overstated, it does get plenty of favorable advocacy as well.

Use an appropriate tool for the job, Python is useful for tons of things that would be a nightmare to pull off in golang, and vice versa.

Re: Learning Go as a Python Developer: The Good and the Bad

#46

Post by zozbot234 »

120photo wrote: post #44

I tried porting a Python utility I wrote to Go specifically because I did not want people to have to install any 3rd party libraries (in this case just one). If anything I had a much deeper appreciation as to how much Python does for you and just lets you work. I would still like to port someday. For now I can containerize my app but that would still require people to install docker and learn how to use docker.

You don't need docker to bundle an app with custom libraries. You can use AppImage which is pretty much just an ordinary app install rolled into a single file.

Re: Learning Go as a Python Developer: The Good and the Bad

#48

Post by benhoyt »

This roughly matches my experience, though he doesn't really discuss the language differences in this article. Here's a similar kind of article I wrote a few years ago, "Learning Go by porting a medium-sized web backend from Python": https://benhoyt.com/writings/learning-go/ -- mine focuses more on language and standard library differences.

Re: Learning Go as a Python Developer: The Good and the Bad

#49

Post by jerf »

nathants wrote: post #33

i dragged my feet on go for a long time. i also thought that skipping go and moving to rust was the play. a few years later, i still write python often, but i don’t build systems with it. python i now use like bash, to glue things together and automate random things. it’s a fantastic language and i will never drop it. the verbosity of go is the biggest hurdle for a pythonista. the thought of giving up context manager…

Obviously the closest thing in the general sense to Python is Ruby. But I think a case can be made that in practice, the closest thing to Python on the static language side is Go. The list of superficial differences is a mile long, I don't deny, nor will I exhaust my audience's patience with actually writing them out. But the interface orientation of Go captures the essence of how you design in Python surprisingly well. Of all the static languages, Go has the closest thing to duck typing, in particular the ability to declare a "duck type" for an existing third-party thing that you don't want to or can't change, and integrate it into your code as a compile-time checked member of that "duck type".

Re: Learning Go as a Python Developer: The Good and the Bad

#50

Post by LtWorf »

AlphaSite wrote: post #24
ActorNightly wrote: post #6

>sharing your code is even pain with colleagues even if they are using the same operating system, mainly because the Python requirement file doesn't pin dependencies, wat? Pretty sure you can use == in requirements.txt Also, its very possible, and quite easy to just include the code for the library in your package, which effectively "locks in" the version. We did this all the time when building AWS lambda deployments…

I recommend using poetry and just moving on with your life, it’s far easier than trying to use pip (which is totally doable, but not clean).

But poetry requires pip… you can't use it without using pip
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