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Comment by adem | Hacker News Reader

"So in the bottom of the ninth, we decided to transliterate our 90k lines of Python directly to Go, line by line."

A question here: Is it always a practical approach to transliterate line by line when transitioning to another language or because "Go [is] semantically very similar to Python"?

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Usually it's too much work to do a refactor with the new language and a conversion.

Much easier to convert first (with whatever warts the existing code base has) then do a refactor.

So I doubt their approach had too much to do with Go per se and more with wanting to get something out sooner rather than later.

Both language semantics and language best practices are pretty similar in Python and Go, and I am sure this helps a lot. Transliterating to something like Java would be hard because their interfaces work differently enough from duck typing to force a lot of refactoring. And switching to something even more different, like Haskell or Clojure, would just make transliteration impossible.

I once consulted for a company whose previous consultant had tried to help them do a line-for-line translation (using off-site random-people-in-a-sweatshop online programmers for hire) from ASP to Rails. They pitched it as "transcoding". I will argue that this was not practical (though I can appreciate the idea that at first glance it almost sounds amazingly scalable ;P).

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