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Comment by nostrademons | Hacker News Reader

I just did a prototype in Go. Python is my normal go-to language for prototyping. I concluded that for prototyping, I'm going back to Python.

My main objections were neither performance nor reliability (I don't care about either while prototyping), but developer productivity. I find there are just so many programming conveniences in Python that I wish I had in Go - list comprehensions, negative slice indexes, for- and with-statements over user-defined data types, heterogenous dictionaries, easy duck-typing. When I just want to get some ideas working to prove a concept, it's really annoying to flesh out all your types and error handling in full detail.

I do think Go would probably make a pretty nice production language, but I'm not at liberty to convert the large C++ and Java systems I work with to Go. Even if I were, I think I would prefer C or C++ because of its easy Python bindings.

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for- and with-statements over user-defined data types

Any reason why doing this with channels and goroutines doesn't fulfill your requirements?

I don't need concurrency, and my app (which is a fairly simple "munge some data from backends, apply some algorithms, and template it" webapp) seems easier to reason about without introducing them.

I don't need concurrency

Except that you do. You've just said it yourself! What the for command does in Python is essentially running two communicating coroutines, passing control between them. Yield-using generators actually make it very explicit, by creating special resumable stack frames. The only difference is that in Go, you're not limited to a single stack frame in the producer, nor do you have to use a loop or the new PEP-380 "yield from" syntax (for example, if you're iterating over a tree). The blocking channel takes care of the execution sequencing. (Also, in Go, the channel makes it possible for the consumer to use multiple stack frames, if you're re-building another data structure instead with the data you receive from the producer, but that seems to be a rarer case. It's a nice symmetry, though.)

The Python equivalent of two communicating goroutines is a bidirectional generator (PEP 342), not a for-loop. I try to use the language construct with the least power.

Basically what I wanted this for is that I have a user-defined type that is basically a list of some other user-defined type, plus some extra stuff. In Python it's trivially easy to implement __iter__ and delegate, and then I could manipulate these objects the way I thought of them, as containers for other objects. In Go...I wonder if I could've used type embedding (making the first member of A be []B), but I don't think the built-in language constructs respect embedding when figuring out what's a legal expression. I ended up biting the bullet and explicitly looping over the slice member, but the point of prototyping is being able to think of your code in the terms of your problem domain.

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