> Before this I used to prefer Go for one-off scripts because it was easy to create a self-contained binary executable.
I still do because:
- Go gives me a single binary
- Dependencies are statically linked
- I don’t need any third-party libs in most scenarios
- Many of my scripts make network calls, and Go has a better stdlib for HTTP/RPC/Socket work
- Better tooling (built-in formatter, no need for pytest, go vet is handy)
- Easy concurrency. Most of my scripts don’t need it, but when they do, it’s easier since I don’t have to fiddle with colored functions, external libs, or, worse, threads.
That said, uv is a great improvement over the previous status quo. But I don’t write Python scripts for reasons that go beyond just tooling. And since it’s not a standard tool, I worry that more things like this will come along and try to “improve” everything. Already scarred and tired in that area thanks to the JS ecosystem. So I tend to prefer stable, reliable, and boring tools over everything else. Right now, Go does that well enough for my scripting needs.
I needed to process a 2 GB xml file the other day. While my Python script was chugging away, I had Claude translate it to Go. The vibe-coded Go program then processed the file before my original Python script terminated. That was the first time I ever touched Go, but it certainly won't be the last.
I still use both Go and Python. But Python gives me access to a lot more libraries that do useful stuff. For example the YouTube transcript example I wrote about in the article was only possible in Python because afaik Go doesn't have a decent library for transcript extraction.
I still do because:
- Go gives me a single binary
- Dependencies are statically linked
- I don’t need any third-party libs in most scenarios
- Many of my scripts make network calls, and Go has a better stdlib for HTTP/RPC/Socket work
- Better tooling (built-in formatter, no need for pytest, go vet is handy)
- Easy concurrency. Most of my scripts don’t need it, but when they do, it’s easier since I don’t have to fiddle with colored functions, external libs, or, worse, threads.
That said, uv is a great improvement over the previous status quo. But I don’t write Python scripts for reasons that go beyond just tooling. And since it’s not a standard tool, I worry that more things like this will come along and try to “improve” everything. Already scarred and tired in that area thanks to the JS ecosystem. So I tend to prefer stable, reliable, and boring tools over everything else. Right now, Go does that well enough for my scripting needs.