What's Go like for REPL-driven / exploratory development? That's mostly how I use Python.
I've heard Go described this way several times, but I've found it to be a significantly lower-level language than Python.
For example, it's much more verbose. In this recent blog post [0], the author converts some C++ code to Go - and it gets longer. 57 lines of C++ become 65 lines of Go. The same code in Python is about 20 lines.
In particular, the author's Go code requires five lines to do the equivalent of Python's `with open(path) as f` and four lines for the equivalent of `word_array = list(word_counts.items())`:
f, err := os.Open(path)
if err != nil {
return err
}
defer f.Close()
// [...]
wordArray := make([]WordCount, 0, len(wordCounts))
for word, count := range wordCounts {
wordArray = append(wordArray, WordCount{word: word, count: count})
}
This is crazy. Many of those lines are closing brackets or whitespace. But moreover, optimizing for characters or LOC is absurd. Optimize for maintainability or readability, at which point Go is at least as good as Python (I would argue better). Optimize for tooling, especially package management and build tooling--Go is many times better than Python here. Optimize for performance--Go is literally hundreds or thousands of times better here. Optimize for breadth and quality of ecosystem. Optimize for deployment story (single small artifact vs hundreds of megabytes of dependencies). These are the things that matter, not lines of code.