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by weberc2 2811 days ago
In the parent’s defense, people write a lot more cryptic Python than they do other languages. There are no metaclasses in Go nor abused operator overloads or half-baked DSLs. People don’t use dictionaries as structs to hang off whatever they like.

It’s kind of a penny wise and pound foolish approach. Arguably it’s not python’s fault, but that’s a poor consolation for folks who have to deal with these messes.
1 comments
olavk 2810 days ago
Is that really true? Sure you can write cryptic code using operator overloads, but the convention is to only use them in cases where they improve readability. For example numpy code would be a lot less maintainable without operator overloading IMHO.

I haven't written numerical code in Go but I am skeptical it will be as maintainable without operators. The lack of a particular feature does not in itself make code more maintainable.

I can't speak to metaclasses, since I have never had to maintain code using them. In my experience they are pretty rare.

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weberc2 2810 days ago
It's been true in my experience. Operator overloads are marginally beneficial and for some reason they're prone to be abused. Put differently, `Add(x, y)` isn't any less maintainable than `x + y`, but the former is pretty much never abused, while the latter is a popular abuse target.

I've been writing Python and Go extensively for the last 10 and 5 years respectively. I really recommend giving Go a shot; you can pick it up in an afternoon and it really complements Python well since it excels at a lot of Python's weaknesses (parallelism, performance, static typing, static compilation, dependency managmenet, etc). For example, if I have to write a CLI tool, I almost always use Go since it's so much easier for coworkers to install a single binary than a Python program + dependencies + make sure you have the right version of the interpreter installed.

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olavk 2807 days ago
Oh I know Go, just haven't used it for numerical tasks.

If Add(x, y) is just as maintainable as x + y, why does Go use operators for the regular numeric types? Why have + at all?

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