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by Cshelton 3727 days ago
> "wow I read this code and I can understand what's happening and hack on it to do something else."

I think that's the issue. For many things, that is perfectly fine. But for other stuff (finance, healthcare, safety critical, anything that loses real money/lives when it breaks), the last thing I want is somebody to just "hack on to it".
2 comments
jb613 3727 days ago
by "hack on it" he/she means being able to 1) easily understand it by looking at it, 2) easily figure out how to modify it (to add functionality or change it). You are reading "hack" as a bad thing when really it's a good thing.

Anything that evolves over time requires changes. All of the examples you give (finance, healthcare, safety, money/lives matter) are better served with people being able to read and maintain that code.

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fixermark 3727 days ago
That's a relative term. Go will give you static type safety (until and unless you [inevitably ;)] break out into the 'reflect' package) and strong assumptions about what default values mean in data structures. These are very nice features to have in terms of trading off flexibility for expressiveness.

Python is not a language I would trust in healthcare, finance, etc. on the critical path of consuming and transforming user-supplied data. Go I'd be comfortable with.

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