Comment by 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.
Even so, Go seems less succinct in comparison on several tasks. Such differences will most likely be magnified in larger programs.
an example from https://www.spacemonkey.com/blog/posts/go-space-monkey -
we decided to transliterate our 90k lines of Python directly to Go, line by line
The 90K number includes our tests, but without tests, the Python codebase is 36,784 lines of code. Those same lines of code became 41,717 lines of Go code. So, not that much of an increase. When you consider that's just 4,933 more lines, it's not crazy to assume most of those are closing braces.
I'd say closing braces and trivial expansions of list comprehensions into 3-5 line loops.
That's definitely interesting, but I'd have to see both codebases to make any real determination. It's plausible their Python code was extremely imperative, overly complex, and/or not idiomatic.