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> It's weird to see people comparing Go and Python in this thread as they solve entirely different problems and shouldn't be interchangeable, not due to developer preference but due to fundamental features of the language.

Yes but when Go first came out, a lot of people jumped on the bandwagon and started proposing they would use Go for web applications too. There's definitely some overlap in building web services with Go and Python so I wouldn't say they solve completely different problems.

Go and Python are also pretty related for command line apps too. You could totally use either one to build a CLI tool.




> Go and Python are also pretty related for command line apps too. You could totally use either one to build a CLI tool.

Distribution of Go CLI apps is much easier as you don't need to have your end users install the 3rd party libraries themselves.


Yeah totally, for using CLI tools I much prefer using a Go binary too because it doesn't involve installing anything.

But in practice as a web developer who occasionally writes CLI scripts, I personally didn't think it was worth going all-in with Go for that.

Especially not when for smaller scripts you can have a Python or Bash script in 1 file[0] and it will run on all major platforms without installing 3rd party libraries too. Most major distros of Linux, MacOS and WSL on Windows have both Python and Bash available. For my use cases that's good enough.

[0]: For example just the other day I released a ~200 line self contained Python script to solve a problem I had which was figuring out what changed between 2 web framework versions: https://github.com/nickjj/verdiff


Given the broad capabilities of the Python first party libraries, you can do a lot of work without 3rd party libraries. It’s not in as much fashion as it was 10+ years ago, but it’s still quite doable.


This is true for Python, too, albeit quite a bit harder due to the relative lack of first-party tooling for generating standalone executables.


As far as I'm aware Go doesn't return the exit status of a process the way Ruby and Python do. Surely this is a big disadvantage for CLI scripts?


Sure it does: https://gobyexample.com/exit

If you mean Go can't read the exit status of a command it runs, that's incorrect as well: https://golang.org/pkg/os/exec/#pkg-overview


I don't know about that. I do a lot of web development and Go is really very nice as a web server.

It's extremely simple and pleasant to use. All it needs is generics and it would be my go to for most web services.




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