Comparing natural brevity and concise expressiveness between Go and shell/Bash for certain tasks using each tool's "standard" library.

bash.sh

curl -s "$url" | tar -zxC "$dest"

golang.go

func downloadAndInstall(url, dest string) error {
  resp, err := http.Get(url)
  if err != nil {
    return error
  }
  defer resp.Body.Close()
  zip, err := gzip.NewReader(resp.Body)
  if err != nil {
    return error
  }
  defer zip.Close()
  archive := tar.NewReader(zip)
  for {
    header, err := archive.Next()
    if err == io.EOF {
      break
    }
    if err != nil {
      return err
    }
    filename := fmt.Sprintf("%s/%s", dest, header.Name)
    file, err := os.Create(filename)
    if err != nil {
      return err
    }
    defer file.Close()
    _, err := io.Copy(file, archive)
    if err != nil {
      return err
    }
  }
}

I definitely see @progrium's point, but in that case, once both versions are safe, the bash version wouldn't be as clearly terse.

@msabramo Python's concurrency story is woeful though, and I fear that asyncio is a long winded wrong turn.