For those of us not deeply familiar with Python vs Go, can you share a bit about why gofmt is so much better than the Python status quo (IE what’s wrong with autopep8 mentioned in article?)?
Think of it this way, if you could all the python code on github and ran it though autopep8, what fraction of the files would be changed?
Generally in the go community, contributions, patches, code, etc that's not formatted with gofmt is considered wrong/broken.
How do humans that disagree with the One Format deal with it? Do they self-select away from Go?
> Think of it this way, if you could all the python code on github and ran it though autopep8, what fraction of the files would be changed?
How does the format evolve over time as the community discovers improvements (if it does), and what are the implications for code on github?
Like much of go, there's the "go" way to do it, and the language simplicity reduces the chance of multiple programmers taking multiple approaches that are all different enough to require wrappers to interoperate. Sure your pet feature from some other language may be missing.
The language (and gofmt) have evolved. In particular since the parser is externally usable (by gofmt, IDEs, and other tools) you can actually use that tool to rename variables, functions, etc without having to worry about getting a REGEXP right. So when there's the occasional incompatible change gofmt can parse code into a tree, make a transformation, and then back info code ... including comments.
It's relatively common (in my experience anyways) to have commit hooks in git run gofmt on go code. Generally go's been very compatible, none of the issues like Python2 vs Python3. I'm sure some avoid go for these reasons, but I lump them in with folks that reject python because of whitespace/indenting.
This pretty much sums it up. Gofmt isn't perfect, but everyone uses it and deals with it. It's included with the language so there's no point in trying to create a "competitor".
I can’t imagine ever picking a language based on this feature and seems weird to even mention it.
This has never caused me a minute of headache and the only time I care is when conflicting styles are used in the same file.
I always thought it was kind of dumb of Go to care about this but don’t care enough to affect my language choice. I don’t use Go but am open if it’s a fit for a project.
I like that Python has that variability and let’s developer make decisions as they see fit.
I don’t want to talk to people about tabs and spaces unless we’re already friends and having a few beers.