Re:Things from Python I'd miss in Go
by Goranek on Tuesday June 10, 2014 @09:40AM
(#7872378)
In the beginning i missed repl, but i've realised using repl in the first place was a mistake.. Now i rely on docs(godoc is awesome) and when i need to test something i use go playground.
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Could you elaborate on why using the repl was a mistake? I don't really miss python's repl, but coming from the Lisp repl, the playground doesn't seem to cut it. Now, if anyone has written an emacs mode that lets you interact with the playground by loading a buffer- I think I'd be much happier.
The repl/insta-repl in LightTable was amazing to me. Particularly what you could do with clojure-script when it was hooked up to the browser.
Instead of going through the docs and code i used dir function inside repl to figure out what to do, how something works and so on.
I missed a REPL at first too, which made me play a bit with REPL-for-Go ideas, but that didn't end up on anything really convenient. What solved the problem was rethinking why the REPL was convenient in the first place, leading to the creation of hsandbox:
Despite it being created for Go, I got quite fond of the approach. Nowadays I also use it for Python, C, etc.
Great tool. In Go, I usually write a throwaway_test.go in whatever package I'm hacking on, and use "go test" as my REPL. (With the intent that these experiments and crude checks should become unit tests later, anyway.) For exploring packages that I'm not developing, this is a nice variation from the Go playground.
The REPL is part of my TDD loop... Which is actually, write a test, come up with a plan to make it pass, google for the programming constructs I need in the language I'm using, test a snippet (or a fully functional line) in the REPL, copy over to my project, make the test pass, ..(refactor). Without the REPL I would have an extra cognitive overhead of wondering if I had introduced a bug through misunderstanding a sketchy part of the docs.