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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

#181

Post by jamal-kumar »

nathants wrote: post #162
jamal-kumar wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've rebuilt multiple projects written in python/php/perl originally in go instead and it's just great how much more performant these comparatively are... Just way lower resource usage and the programs work faster now. It's worth it to consider the switch. One of the things that go is really good for is the amount you can get done without having to deviate that far from the standard library. A lot of churn in updatin…

i agree, performance and stdlib are very nice benefits. i enjoy refactoring with type safety and using gopls and ide completion instead of external docs. i used to constantly read boto3 docs in a browser, now i use gopls in my ide. frontend dev can be sane[1] too! my default setup is a go lambda with an spa frontend inlined into an html file. the lambda zip contains two files: - ./main - ./index.html.gz 1. https://gi…

I like TypeScript + deno [1] a lot these days for similar reasons... It's got the same thing going for it, a solid standard library on top of something like JS but sucks less.

[1] https://deno.land/

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

#182

Post by tptacek »

sph wrote: post #163
tptacek wrote: post #5

I hated the "damnable use requirement" (the error you get on unused imports) for years, but I've been keeping a count of how many bugs they've caught (I was surprised the first time this happened) and I'm up to 3-4 now. What people who code in Go seriously do is just hook `goimports` up to their editor, and then never think about this again.

Every time someone mentions this fact I think about Zig having recently added this "feature" and my blood boils. Unused imports or variables being errors is the most idiotic and overrated paper cut ever implemented in compilers. In no universe it is a good idea. I posit there are actually no or very few bugs it catches, and in exchange it ruins people's iterative development, flow and hyperfocus states when experimen…

It has caught some bugs for me, and I essentially never think about it anymore, because `goimports` just handles this. It is substantially easier for me to deal with imports in a Go program than in a Python program, and if I look back at my old code, I wince at all the pointless crap at the top of my programs.

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

#183

Post by Spivak »

thinker5555 wrote: post #165
smeagull wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The real issue is that you can't have multiple versions installed at the same time. if you could import numpy==3.2 it'd solve many problems.

Granted, I'm more of a hobbiest than a dev, but I think this is part of the problem that virtualenvs are supposed to help solve. One project (virtualenv) can have numpy==3.2, and another can have numpy==3.1. Maybe I'm naive, but it seems like having a one project with multiple versions of numpy being imported/called at various times would be asking for trouble.

The thing you can’t do is solve for this situation.

    A depends on B, C
    B depends on D==1.24
    C depends on D==2.02
There should in an super ideal world be no problem with this. You would just have a “linker” that inserts itself in the module loader that presents different module objects when deps ask for “D” but it hasn’t happened yet.

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

#184

Post by XorNot »

tmh88j wrote: post #174
FridgeSeal wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No but there’s a walrus operator! Not sure anyone was asking for that, unlike a fix for packaging issues.

I really like the walrus operator. It's helped me to create more straightforward if/elif blocks and loops. Effective python has some pretty good examples. https://effectivepython.com/2020/02/02/prevent-repetition-wi...

This really isn't a good argument though: it's an extra, extremely specific use case for assignment that looks visually very similar.

And worse, effects code maintainability - if you need that assignment higher up, you're now editing the if statement, adding an assignment, plus whatever your interstitial code is.

Python doesn't have block scoping so the argument for it is weak.

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

#185

Post by tmh88j »

XorNot wrote: post #184
tmh88j wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really like the walrus operator. It's helped me to create more straightforward if/elif blocks and loops. Effective python has some pretty good examples. https://effectivepython.com/2020/02/02/prevent-repetition-wi...

This really isn't a good argument though: it's an extra, extremely specific use case for assignment that looks visually very similar. And worse, effects code maintainability - if you need that assignment higher up, you're now editing the if statement, adding an assignment, plus whatever your interstitial code is. Python doesn't have block scoping so the argument for it is weak.

It's not for extremely specific use-case, unless you consider using variables as a condition of an if statement or loop extremely specific.

> And worse, effects code maintainability - if you need that assignment higher up, you're now editing the if statement, adding an assignment, plus whatever your interstitial code is.

How is that different than variables declared without the walrus operator? If you declare a variable with the walrus operator and decide to move its declaration you can still continue to reference that variable in the same spot, just like any other variable. Do you have an example you can share to demonstrate this? I'm not sure I understand what you mean.

> Python doesn't have block scoping so the argument for it is weak.

The walrus operator another way to define variables, not change how they behave. It's just another addition to the "pythonic" way of coding. It's helped me to write more concise and even clearer code. I suggest reading the Effective Python link I provided for some examples of how you can benefit from it.

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

#186

Post by KptMarchewa »

ActorNightly wrote: post #138
jeremydw wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Its not a mess, people just make it a mess because of the lack of understanding around it, and getting lazy with using a combination of pip install, apt install, and whatever else. Also, the problem is compounded by people using Mac to develop, which have a different way of handling system wide python installs from brew, and then trying to port that to Linux.

No one sane actually advocates using system python to develop anything, whether on mac or linux

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

#187

Post by KptMarchewa »

chpmrc wrote: post #118
jeremydw wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

- Poetry is a 3rd party package manager, I'm sure it's great but it's not widely used (yet) - Pip freeze just pins all dependencies at once to requirements.txt - I don't know what "vendoring in dependency code" means - I've never used pipreqs in my life (and 80% of my work has been in Python) - Virtualenvs are just a convenient way to keep project runtimes separated And for 90% of Python projects in existence the fol…

>- python -m venv .venv

>- source .venv/bin/activate

If those two steps were automatic like in node.js we'd literally have 99% less problems.

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

#188

Post by ok_dad »

XorNot wrote: post #184
tmh88j wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really like the walrus operator. It's helped me to create more straightforward if/elif blocks and loops. Effective python has some pretty good examples. https://effectivepython.com/2020/02/02/prevent-repetition-wi...

This really isn't a good argument though: it's an extra, extremely specific use case for assignment that looks visually very similar. And worse, effects code maintainability - if you need that assignment higher up, you're now editing the if statement, adding an assignment, plus whatever your interstitial code is. Python doesn't have block scoping so the argument for it is weak.

It’s really handy in comprehensions to do assignments outside the normal syntax.

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

#189

Post by atst »

takeda wrote: post #83
aidenn0 wrote: post #65

I only use python casually, but it seems to me that python library authors are always refactoring and breaking interfaces. Recently, there was a bug in a second order dependency, and the version that fixed this bug was after a version that moved a function into a submodule. So I had to make a local patch to my dependency that changed all of the imports. Was the new interface more consistent? Yes, but could they have…

I think that depends on library. The ones I use seem to use appear to not do that. In fact I think I actually have seen that more in Go. What goes for Go though is that you won't compile your code until you fix it. In Python you could use mypy, but unfortunately is optional and will work only if you and library author uses annotations.

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

#190

Post by leetrout »

takeda wrote: post #172
sph wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being 31 years old doesn't preclude having a decent, official and reproducible way of installing packages in 2022. That's just a bad excuse to justify subpar package managers and terrible governance around this problem. Package management is pretty much a solved problem, no matter how old is your language. It smells to an outsider like me like a lot of bike-shedding and not enough pragmatism is going on in Python lan…

But Python has a decent and a reproducible way of installing packages. The problem python has is that things evolved over time, so you can find on the net plenty of outdated information. There is also a lot of blogs and articles with bad practices, most written by people that got something working. I think also a lot of issues with packaging is ironically because of PyPA that supposed to work on a standard, but in re…

> I think Python would benefit as a whole if PyPA was just dissolved

STRONG agree. And I hate the cult of personality that was previously (still?) strong.

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