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Comment by bayesianhorse | Hacker News Reader

Using the term "scripting language" for either Go or Python is a complete misnomer.

Back in the day, languages called as such where so slow, that there was a feeling that they were used "in lieu" of "real" programming languages. They were there to extend "real" software.

Today? Much the opposite. Computing power is almost always cheaper than brain power, and we use C to extend Python rather than the other way around.

For that matter, I think Go is great for networked infrastructure, but bad for interfacing with other languages and still significantly harder to learn than Python, Julia and R.

That is why I caution on the use of Go in projects which have "scientific" bent to them...

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Go is way easier to learn than Python for real applications. Python might be easier for your first few times playing with a programming language, but the complexity ramps up fast. There are a lot of features in python - classes, decorators, all the __foo__ stuff... I think it's a lot easier to understand all of Go than all of Python.

I can't comment on R or Julia, since I haven't used them, but I would doubt they're simpler than Go.

I understand pushing back against the idea that Go is a scripting language.

Arguing that Python isn't a "scripting language" is a complete waste of time. That ship sailed at least 5 years ago, if not 15.

And Python is still very, very slow, and very difficult to make multicore (if you disagree, compare with Go), and there are plenty of domains where it should not be chosen as a result. Yes, I know about PyPy, but that project's performance characteristics are very strange and certainly isn't "it just speeds up Python code by 10x, all the time"... sometimes it does that, sometimes (rarely) it slows it down, mostly it does something in the middle that certainly doesn't bring Python anywhere near C.

For me, a scripting language is used to extend a larger more inflexible software project. Like scripting in Office Suites, Blender or similar.

Python is growing in popularity, and in the majority of cases it is used as the "primary" language now. That's why "scripting" is a misnomer, even if technically CPython is not compiled to machine language.

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