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Comment by uggedal | Hacker News Reader

By switching this early to Go you'd have to write much of what is available as third party libraries in Python yourself.

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On the upside, this gives you the ability to be the one that implements and open-sources some of the later heavily-used libraries and to carve a name for yourself in a burgeoning Go community.

This would hopefully lead on to job opportunities down the road.

This is a very good point. Getting in ahead of the curve on up-and-coming open source projects is an excellent way to become an in-demand consultant/freelancer/contractor.

I managed to get in fairly early on Drupal, and it's been a nice source of work over the years.

I'm hoping someday in the future your statement will sound silly. There's got to be some way we can avoiding rewriting all the libraries every time a new language comes around.

The Parrot VM [http://www.parrot.org/] has been discussed here before: [http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=552850]

Projects like this might help, but I suspect there will always be someone willing to port a library to be native.

Well, auto-generating cross-language bindings so that you can make function calls between code written in arbitrary languages would be a good start. Limited subsets of this exist, usually variations on "how to call C libraries from other languages" since that's the most common scenario.

For example, there's SWIG: http://www.swig.org/

Unfortunately, there tend to be subtle issues of impedance mismatch that make cross-languages bindings never feel quite right.

clojure, scala, jruby, etc all can use java's large source of libraries.

Yeah, this is my main reaction, too. I couldn't switch until something like scipy was available.

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