Learning Apache OpenWhisk

Chapter 10. Developing OpenWhisk Actions in Go

So far we have seen how to develop OpenWhisk actions in two programming languages: JavaScript and Python. Those two programming languages have many points in common: they are both interpreted languages with loosely typed variables (the common term to define them is that they are both “scripting” languages). They also have in common flexible data structures that map easily into JSON data. Probably the main difference is that most frontend developers use JavaScript, while Python is more popular among backend developers, system administrators, and even data scientists.

Given the similarities, picking one of the two is probably largely a matter of taste and available libraries. For example, JavaScript offers good libraries to manage web services, while Python has more data analysis and machine learning libraries.

Those two languages are generally productive, but the lack of strong typing can hinder development when the application grows in size, requiring you to put more effort into testing. Lack of type checking can also mean less control over data structures, which can be a problem with large programs. For those use cases, you may want to use a more strongly typed programming language.

Numerous programming languages offer stronger type checking than Python and JavaScript. The first one that comes to mind is probably Java. However, in the serverless world, the programming language on the rise is Go. Go shares many features with Java, ...