Comment by NateDad

11 years ago

Go is not significantly more verbose than python except in a couple trivial cases (list comprehensions become a 3 line loop). Across even a moderately sized program, this will most likely not even amount for a statistically significant difference.

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NateDad

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meowface  11 years ago

As a professional Python developer and amateur Go dabbler, I very vehemently disagree.

Without access to list/dict/set comprehensions, or libraries like itertools, or a lightweight lambda syntax or something like Ruby's blocks, transformations on collections will always be considerably more tedious and verbose.

Various functions have "bring-your-own-buffer" calling conventions, which will often double or triple the number of lines required for those function calls.

No tuple unpacking, no ability for functional programming (Python's isn't that amazing but with functools and some of the builtins, you can get pretty far), no operators for string formatting or anything but absolute barebones operations.

Combine that with what Go lacks even compared to languages like Java (no inheritance [which is usually an anti-pattern but does decrease verbosity when used properly], no generics, no deep type/class reflection) and it's hard to say that Go isn't a verbose language.

No statically typed language is going to be as terse or expressive as Python can be.

  • NateDad  11 years ago

    Can you explain how tuples are significantly different from multiple returns in real programs? You can do

        func foo() (string, int, bool) {
        return "one", 2, true
    }

    func bar(s string, i int, b bool) {}

    bar(foo())

    • meowface  11 years ago

      When dealing with function calls, they're roughly the same.

      But how about things like:

          g = some_input() # A list with 3 elements
    a, b, c = g

      Or in Python 3+:

          lst = [1, 2, 3, 4]
    head, *tail = lst # 1, [2, 3, 4]
    *init, last = lst # [1, 2, 3], 4
    a, *b, c = lst # 1, [2, 3], 4

      1 reply →

Paddy3118  11 years ago

Go does seem more verbose than Python. Rosetta code tries for idiomatic solutions to common tasks, here's one such completed in both Python and Go: http://rosettacode.org/wiki/Bitcoin/address_validation

You would need to know the nature of the tasks to pick out those that need longer answers but all the Go tasks are here: http://rosettacode.org/wiki/Category:Go - most of which should have Python solutions.

  • NateDad  11 years ago

    Most of those programs are trivially small, and often consist mostly of transformative loops. Yes, go will be worse than python for that. But in a real project, the difference will be minimal, a few percent, which will be lost in the noise of the specific implementations, tests, etc.