Golang from the perspective of a python developer.
From its first appearance in 1991, till now, Python has remained the most popular programming language. The high level, interpreted language had a lot going for it- Low barrier to entry, ubiquitous libraries, and framework for anything you can think of and, an active and supportive community to help you in every step of the way. I am primarily from a python background. It is my go-to language for scripting, it puts food on the table and it has made life quite easy. But like everything else in life, it is not perfect- for every duck typing to make development time faster, the runtime is slow and filled with errors, for every package to make your life easier the distribution and backward compatibility leave a lot to be desired.
Golang by prospective younger than python. It came out in 2009 and has been gaining slow and steady momentum. In stack overflow survey of 2020 golang the fifth most loved programming language, which is quite impressive considering it’s only behind most beloved languages like rust and python. It is also the third most wanted language in which people have expressed interest to learn. Only behind giants like python and javascript.
It is a modern language that fits the requirement of things that both beginners and experts. Beginners want simple language, which they can learn and use easily. And versatility that it can be worked in lots of different projects. Experts want faster development time, things like concurrency and parallelism, and good garbage collection to make their code scalable. Its a really optimistic language, fighting with c and rust for speed, easiness to learn with python and java script but falling little short in both.
Like everyone else, I got attracted to golang by Google’s promise of simplicity, speed, and concurrency. Golang was easy to learn. I have been coding in golang as a hobby and sneaking a few go code in my work when no one is looking.
There are few deal breakers that keep me awake at night, but the overall experience has been quite welcoming. In this article, I will talk about some of the things golang did right and somewhere it has fallen short compared to python in my perspective. This is just a surface-level analysis, if you are more curious you can refer to the articles at the end.
#golang #python #programming-languages #go #a logical progression to python
