Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Python Is Easy. Go Is Simple. Simple != Easy

preslav.me

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 313 posts

Re: Python Is Easy. Go Is Simple. Simple != Easy

#91

Post by chrsig »

mrweasel wrote: post #36
zimpenfish wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it doesn't have this overbloated concept of inheritance and polymorphism of let's say Java where you have to look through 6 files to understand what's even going on Several Go codebases I've worked on would like a word. Some Go people really love their interfaces and abstractions and making sure every method is only 3 lines and pretty soon you're 20 files and three type hierarchies deep trying to figure out what a…

A certain number of developers will be able to complicate any language or mechanism you provide them, it's how they feel important. I've notice the there is a group of people who has their entire identity tied up in being "smarter" than everyone else, except they aren't, so they build extremely complex systems, because they think that's what smart people do. They are interestingly often extremely well versed in their…

> They are interestingly often extremely well versed in their tool of choice.

This has become a red flag to me; over attachment to a tool or paradigm means that they're driven by and making decisions using feelings, not through actual analysis.

Re: Python Is Easy. Go Is Simple. Simple != Easy

#92

Post by sroussey »

sethammons wrote: post #71
throwawa14223 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone with the misfortune of inheriting a million plus loc Go project I disagree. Go is a nightmare from the duck typing to dependency management.

I think you typed "python" wrong :) Duck typing is a python thing. And the dependency management is a nightmare, constantly breaking. To the article's point - you _must_ run it in a container and defer to the OS to have anything resembling a sane development story.

I think you typed “JavaScript” wrong…

;)

Re: Python Is Easy. Go Is Simple. Simple != Easy

#94

Post by sethammons »

throwawa14223 wrote: post #83
sethammons wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you typed "python" wrong :) Duck typing is a python thing. And the dependency management is a nightmare, constantly breaking. To the article's point - you _must_ run it in a container and defer to the OS to have anything resembling a sane development story.

Ok that's totally fair. What's the Go name for it? In my mind Go interfaces are duck typed.

mostly joking - your complaints are big problems in python. Dependency management in Go has been contentious (historically) with "to vendor or not to vendor", glide and dep, GOPATH, etc. But that is all solved. Go mod for the win.

As far as "the nightmare of {using interfaces}" -- I have no clue to any controversy there. It is one of the most celebrated features of Go. Not sure where you were going with that. In Python, I do find duck typing to be a nightmare because you don't actually _know_ what you have. Can you change it? Try it and if it breaks you will know. Or you use it like a list but it is a string and that gives strange, unexpected behavior, so you end up doing things like `param=force_list(maybe_string_or_list)`.

Re: Python Is Easy. Go Is Simple. Simple != Easy

#95

Post by lokar »

throwawa14223 wrote: post #83
sethammons wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you typed "python" wrong :) Duck typing is a python thing. And the dependency management is a nightmare, constantly breaking. To the article's point - you _must_ run it in a container and defer to the OS to have anything resembling a sane development story.

Ok that's totally fair. What's the Go name for it? In my mind Go interfaces are duck typed.

What were they actually doing? Passing interface{} all the time and casting it?

Re: Python Is Easy. Go Is Simple. Simple != Easy

#96

Post by lemagedurage »

sethammons wrote: post #53

I'm diving back into python after being mostly away for the better part of a decade having built high scale, highly available systems in Go during that time (including migrating several projects from python and perl to go). Being suddenly back in python is jarring. So much inheritance - abstract base classes and multiple inheritance via mixins, strange coupling in tests via over use of mocking and patching, and a rel…

Python code typically doesn't and shouldn't rely heavily on inheritance. It sounds like you're working on non-idiomatic Python code. Bad luck.

Re: Python Is Easy. Go Is Simple. Simple != Easy

#97

Post by lambda_garden »

alsodumb wrote: post #82
lambda_garden wrote: post #68

Python is valuable due to the ecosystem of libraries it offers. The language itself is extremely poor. I think this is not something most Python users are aware of since if you are doing ML, data-science or simple scripting there is little reason to step outside of the ecosystem. - Weird scoping rules - Very limited list-comprehensions - Ability to monkey patch things is a liability - Mutability by default - Lack of…

I mean it's not like MATLAB where a company put in millions of dollars to make these libraries - the entire ecosystem was developed by open source contributors because they liked something about Python - sure, it's probably not as sophisticated as some of the other languages, but it has a low barrier of entry, it has users, and people developed libraries - in some cases because that's where users are and in many case…

> they liked something about Python

I think it's simply what they already knew. Very few programmers learn multiple languages to any kind of depth.

Is there any evidence that Python is an easy language to learn? I think we've reached a situation where beginners learn Python because it's seen as beginner friendly... because beginners learn Python!

Re: Python Is Easy. Go Is Simple. Simple != Easy

#98

Post by thruway516 »

mrweasel wrote: post #36
zimpenfish wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it doesn't have this overbloated concept of inheritance and polymorphism of let's say Java where you have to look through 6 files to understand what's even going on Several Go codebases I've worked on would like a word. Some Go people really love their interfaces and abstractions and making sure every method is only 3 lines and pretty soon you're 20 files and three type hierarchies deep trying to figure out what a…

A certain number of developers will be able to complicate any language or mechanism you provide them, it's how they feel important. I've notice the there is a group of people who has their entire identity tied up in being "smarter" than everyone else, except they aren't, so they build extremely complex systems, because they think that's what smart people do. They are interestingly often extremely well versed in their…

Very well put. "They are interestingly often extremely well versed in their tool of choice." People who are, shall I say unwise, but very good at what they do is one of the most annoying things wrong with the world.

Re: Python Is Easy. Go Is Simple. Simple != Easy

#99

Post by lambda_garden »

phplovesong wrote: post #4

No matter what your opinion is about Go (as a language), but they nailed it for bigger projects. Go code always looks the same, performance is predictable and fast enough for most programs, and its really, really easy to be productive. When i picked up Go i basically got shit done without ever having written a single line of Go. Its statically typed (with generics yey!) and compiles very fast. Its easy to create smal…

What's strange is that Java predates Go and has all of these attributes. C# too, for that matter.

Re: Python Is Easy. Go Is Simple. Simple != Easy

#100

Post by klodolph »

amelius wrote: post #67
mFixman wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used Go for many years. My issue is that it's _almost_ a great language, but in its current version it's just a collection of foot guns that makes it difficult to get shit done. Go doesn't have some of the most library functions, so large codebases shared between teams end up with a dozen different implementations of functions like "minimum" or "filter". Good luck debugging a bug in one of the implementations. The…

I tried Go for about a day, and the exception handling and null-pointer issues were exactly the things that made me lose interest.

I can understand why you felt the need to share that, but if you only used it for about a day, aren’t you just reporting your initial impressions? If I used Rust for about a day, I would probably complain about the borrow checker. And if I used Python for about a day, I would have no idea what people are talking about when they complain about package management in Python.
Post reply on HN