On 29 May 2015 05:25, "Chris Barker" <chris.barker@noaa.gov> wrote:
>
> OK, I'm really confused here:
>
> 1) what the heck is so special about go all of a sudden? People have been writing and deploying single file executables built with C and ++, and whatever else? forever. (and indeed, it was a big sticking point for me when I introduced python in my organization)

For scientific Python folks, the equivalent conversations I have are about Julia.

If you're not used to thinking of Python's competitive position as "best orchestration language, solid competitor in any given niche", then the rise of niche specific competitors like Go & Julia can feel terrifying, as the relatively narrow user base changes the trade-offs you can make in the language & ecosystem design to better optimise them for that purpose.

We don't need to debate the accuracy of that perception of risk, though. If it motivates folks to invest time & energy into providing one-obvious-way to do cross-platform single-file distribution, lower barriers to adoption for PyPy, and work on a Rust-style memory ownership based model for concurrent execution of subinterpreters across multiple cores, then the community wins regardless :)

Cheers,
Nick.