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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

#191

Post by tialaramex »

notduncansmith wrote: post #39
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.…

“There are only two kinds of languages: the ones people complain about and the ones nobody uses.” - Bjarne Stroustrup

I own a T-shirt which says "Haters gonna make some good points". People do indeed only complain about the things which are used and not the things they don't care about because nobody uses them. But, we should not think this means the complaints just signify success.

People are complaining because they care, but also because it's not good, or it's not as good as it should be.

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

#192

Post by oarabbus_ »

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 The problem python has is that things evolved over time, so you can find on the net plenty of outdated information.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…

>But Python has a decent and a reproducible way of installing packages.

Reading the comment thread it's not immediately clear what the answer is - it seems implied that the proper way is using Poetry, is that the case?

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

#193

Post by nouveaux »

bobbylarrybobby wrote: post #99
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.

How is this better than downgrading the error into a warning? You'd be able to build but would still know something was wrong-ish. Certainly a warning would be sufficient to chase down any bugs, and is very freeing compared to an error.

This. Better yet, make this a --strict requirement you can turn on in CI and leave it out for normal development.

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

#194

Post by mypalmike »

oars wrote: post #161
mypalmike wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Upgrading dependencies is fraught in all languages.

Haven't had any issues in Go so far.

As soon as you take 2 dependencies in any language, there's a chance you will not be able to upgrade both of them to latest versions because somewhere in the two dependency subgraphs there is a conflict. There's no magic to avoid this, though tooling can help find potentially working versions (at least by declaration). It's often the case that you don't encounter conflicts in Python or other languages, but I don't imagine that Go is immune.

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

#197

Post by jhardy54 »

mypalmike wrote: post #194
oars wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Haven't had any issues in Go so far.

As soon as you take 2 dependencies in any language, there's a chance you will not be able to upgrade both of them to latest versions because somewhere in the two dependency subgraphs there is a conflict. There's no magic to avoid this, though tooling can help find potentially working versions (at least by declaration). It's often the case that you don't encounter conflicts in Python or other languages, but I don't im…

Are you familiar with npm? I haven’t used it deeply in years, but the last time I checked it still supported conflicting dependencies.

If A and B both depend on different versions of C, then both versions of C are installed and A/B see the version they want.

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

#198

Post by rewgs »

sph wrote: post #153
takeda wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Keep in mind that Python is 31 year old (it's even older than Java) it was created around the same time as world wide web. So it started when no one even knew they would need dependency management and evolved over time from people posting packages on their home pages, to a central website to what we now call PyPI. Similarly the tooling and way of packaging the code evolved. What you described are multiple tools that…

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…

I used to think this and rage at the current state of Python dependency management. Then I just buckled down and learned the various tools. It's honestly fine.

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

#199

Post by mypalmike »

jhardy54 wrote: post #197
mypalmike wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As soon as you take 2 dependencies in any language, there's a chance you will not be able to upgrade both of them to latest versions because somewhere in the two dependency subgraphs there is a conflict. There's no magic to avoid this, though tooling can help find potentially working versions (at least by declaration). It's often the case that you don't encounter conflicts in Python or other languages, but I don't im…

Are you familiar with npm? I haven’t used it deeply in years, but the last time I checked it still supported conflicting dependencies. If A and B both depend on different versions of C, then both versions of C are installed and A/B see the version they want.

I've used npm but an not familiar with these kinds of details of it. There would seem to be some potential putfalls, such as two libraries accessing a single system resource (a config file, a system socket, etc.). I will take a look into this though. Thanks.

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

#200

Post by rewgs »

okasaki wrote: post #96
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…

Sometimes I feel people are using Python very differently than me. I just use pip freeze and virtualenv (these are Python basics, not some exotic tools) and I feel it works great. Granted, you don't get a nice executable, but it's still miles ahead of C++ (people literally put their code into header files so you don't have to link to a library), and even modern languages like rust (stuff is always broken, or I have s…

Yup. PyEnv for installing various versions. /path/to/pyenv/version/bin/python -m venv venv. Activate the venv (I made "av" and "dv" aliases in my .zshrc). Done, proceed as usual.
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