At a certain scale though, the amount you'd save in infrastructure bills by using Go instead of Python is absolutely stupid. A 10x difference would not be surprising in the slightest.
Where I’m from the most popular techs are .net (not core), Java, PHP and Django. Django is perfectly viable in that regard.
Go may be better, but if you can run Instagram on Django, I don’t think most people will really have to worry about scalability. Go might become popular eventually, but right now, there isn’t a single golang job in my country, so you know. :)
That's like walking into a Django club and telling everyone their framework sucks. Even as a member that only gets you so far.
I can't believe you also called it difficult to maintain! Because when you say slow, the response its easy to maintain, and you went ahead and called it difficult to maintain?
At least give us a reason.
Python is difficult to maintain. Full stop. Why? Anything in Python can do anything to anything else - there are no boundaries which makes it basically impossible to reason about code at scale. You need very strictly enforced code quality standards across your entire codebase and libraries in order to be able to trust anything - otherwise you don't know if some method on a class has been swapped out right underneath your feet, or if some field access is actually calling a function which is accessing a database.
Go is super easy to reason about compared to Python - as long as no one is importing unsafe or reflect (easy to check), you have very solid guarantees as to what can happen at any point.
We also could have done Django a lot better. And all of the Celery stuff probably should have been Go, especially with the Cassandra driver we were using. Still, I'm using Django today and as long as you don't abuse the ORM and nested DRF serializers too much, it's very scalable. I think as long as you make separate services in other languages at the right time for the right use cases, it's a very valid choice for rapidly building an API.
I am. So, yes.
They baked all features necessary right into the language. You get a http server, ssl support, templating engine etc. right in the language. You also have a database agnostic database driver right in the language. Python is also similar in many ways, it comes with "batteries included". But in my experience go standard library is written in a crystal clear straight-forward way. My workflow (and I believe the workflows of many programs) always involves jumping to the source of go standard library and just reading the code.
Django on the other hand has layers and layers of magic, you've got an ORM, modules etc. etc. Some people might like to let a framework handle everything, learn it inside and out and use it. But for other people like me, with a short attention span, django seems subjectively boring. Maybe if I didn't program as a hobby and it was my job to learn django I might have taken the time and learn it.
I started the django tutorial twice in the last 2-3 years. Both the times, I got bored and left. My subjective opinion was that it didn't teach me anything besides how to "generate" a site with Django. OTOH I had much more luck with Flask. Immediately after following the tutorial I was able to write websites and deploy them.
I think it's a matter of taste. I don't like big frameworks, I like to keep things very simple and minimal. My favorite OS of choice is OpenBSD, my favorite languages are C, Golang and Python. I don't like to use IDEs, I use Emacs, even Emacs feels a bit bloated sometimes.
From time to time I get the urge to try one of the big frameworks like Rails and Django, but I never quite got them.
The tipping point for me was actually progressing through these tutorials a few times.
In Ralis land, creating a new page results in no less than 3 files being touched. A new view and controller, and a modification to routes.rb so the page can be hit. If those pages need to interact with the database, you also need to create a model and likely a database migration to write your new tables. Once you get comfortable with the ecosystem, you stop seeing the generators as newbie crutches and start seeing them as serious time savers. It's like you're learning a Rake-based metalanguage that spits out Ruby and ERB code.
It's much less time consuming to just delete any extra boilerplate than to make all those changes by hand.
That said, if you dig simplicity, then things like Django and Rails (especially Rails) will be huge turnoffs. The magic is their selling point :)
Nowadays I want to dig a little deeper into uwsgi with Python.
Maybe at the end of my journey, I will reach enlightenment and get to the point where I start seeing the generators as serious time savers. For now I feel like, if I want a generator, I'll build one :).
Not really. What about sessions? Auth? CSRF protection?
But if you look at it, csrf is just a hidden form value involving a token injected into the page. It is not hard to implement. In that sense Flask doesn't have csrf proection either.
Session management on the other hand could be troubling, but in the end they all rely on cookies: if I take a look at https://golang.org/src/net/http/cookie.go , I can easily make sense of it. But I can imagine the need for a higher level library for session management.
There is something called gorilla toolkit which has session management, but you're right it isn't included in the standard library. Golang's own template engine is also very primitive.
Interesting, when one of the complaints about Java is exactly this.
The key point here is our programmers are Googlers, they’re not researchers. They’re typically, fairly young, fresh out of school, probably learned Java, maybe learned C or C++, probably learned Python. They’re not capable of understanding a brilliant language but we want to use them to build good software. So, the language that we give them has to be easy for them to understand and easy to adopt. [1]
[1] http://nomad.uk.net/articles/why-gos-design-is-a-disservice-... citing the quote from http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/Lang-NEXT/Lang-NEXT-2014/Fro...
I guess its fine if you have a small project and aren't going to see much traffic, but Python is so slow and difficult to maintian compared to (e.g.) Go. I say this as someone who worked in Python for a long time, and on several large Django projects.