Quote Scraper

I was interested in learning more about the Go programming language so I wrote a short script in Go to scrape quotes from Goodreads.

You can find the code here.

What about Python?

I've enjoyed using Go for this project and see some advantages over Python:

1. We'd need (something like) Requests + BeautifulSoup in Python for this task vs only Colly for Go
   • Not a big issue here, but the fewer external dependencies the better!
2. Parallelism is easier to implement in Go
   • This is built into Colly, to enable it we just use the two lines to set things up:

       c := colly.NewCollector(colly.Async())
       c.Limit(&colly.LimitRule{
         DomainGlob: "*",
         Parallelism: numThreads,
         Delay: time.Second
     })
   • In Python we'd need to explicitly set up a ThreadPool or use asyncio
3. Dependency management is much less painful in Go than in Python
   • In Go we just specify dependencies in the go.mod file and that's it!
   • Once we compile the script we can run it as a standalone binary
   • ...compared to Python where we'd always need an interpreter + correct libraries installed
     • There are things like PyInstaller that can compile python, but the resulting binary will typically be larger and less performant than the original script
4. Go is statically typed
   • No more runtime type errors at!