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Comment by rogerdpack | Hacker News Reader

Did he say that people looking for faster build times than C++ went to java? They may not have found what they were looking for, in that case...

Go does lack a quality [IMO] IDE [re: REPL use is for development], but that can still come with time.

Quality GUI bindings can also come with time [how often do you actually use Python for GUI stuff, though...but still nice to have, just not its major use I doubt]

Another thing you'll miss from Python is accidentally typo'ing variable names and having to discover that only at runtime :)

Just my rebuttal :)

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Java is faster to build than C++ almost all of the time. Header files (especially with templates) tend to turn C++ in to an O(n^2) run time, often running into hours.

OK, the only thing I can compare it against is my current "java" build times, and I can tell you that using maven is somewhat slow. So I guess you could say that if people went to java from c++ for the improved build times, they might still be interested in Go for the same improvement over java :)

Another thing you'll miss from Python is accidentally typo'ing variable names and having to discover that only at runtime :)

    python -m compileall .

I was referring to typo'ing for instance assignment (perhaps you were as well?)

a = 3 if true: a2 = 4 # lame I know--but beginners like me do it

--Python lets discover your failure at runtime...[as a good dynamic typed language does--Go doesn't FWIW]. It was just from an experience I had with learning Python recently. Now it makes me wonder what his blog post would look like saying things he'd miss going from Go to Python, or "what I wouldn't miss from Python..."

Well, your example is just not an error in Python. It might be a bug, it not be what you meant to do, but it is not an error in a dynamically typed language like Python. It is valid, legal code.

My point was just that although Python is dynamically typed, it is still a compiled-to-bytecode language (much as Java is) and you don't have to discover your errors at runtime, that is optional. You have the ability to perform just the compile step without executing the bytecode. The 'compileall' command does that.

There are also great tools like pylint for static source code checking. And of course unit testing is always key.

But of course, if you are looking to catch typing and variable declaration bugs at compile time, you need to be using a statically typed language.

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