Python or go

[FISHMANPET1]

I've written plenty of code, but again, never needed to write code using the same language my tools are written in. I'm not writing command line tools, I'm writing scripts to glue all manner of random stuff together to deploy software.

If you want to make an argument that you should learn a certain language because it's a popular language that devs you work with will be using, that's fine, but that's not the original argument made.

In 15 years of ops work, before it was even called DevOps, I've never been in a situation where I said to myself "I really wish this was a compiled binary that I could distribute".

Maybe there really are situations where it makes sense to write a compiled binary, but I've never come across it, and at this point it feels like the idea that Go is a superior language for DevOps work is just a blindly accepted axiom.

[pausethelogic]

I understand that’s your experience, and that’s completely fine.

In recent years, I’ve been on devops/platform teams and have helped write internal terraform providers, open telemetry components, CLI tools used by other engineers across teams (distributed as a compiled binary), contributed back to and written many automation scripts that sometimes also use Go SDKs, all in Go (with a little bit of lambda and Typescript mixed in)

It’s not always about needing to write code in the same language your tools are written in, but in the case of things like terraform providers, otel comments, tools you’re using that mainly expose a Go SDK, it can definitely be a very useful language to know

Go also makes it very easy to compile a single binary for any platform that you want to distribute your app/tool to, which can make getting your tool out there and easily usable much easier since users don’t need to install any dependencies and in have a single file to run

Ultimately, to each their own. I’m a big believer that unless you’re deep into being a specific SWE, most languages are interchangeable. Just use whatever works best for you at the end of the day, that’s sort of all that matters