Carl Montanari

Carl defines himself as an ex(?) network person. He is a Python and Go developer, and creator of Scrapli(go), a Go package used in this book.

When I first started getting involved in the network automation community, the idea of anything but Python for network automation felt a bit insane. Of course, there were folks out there using things other than Python—maybe they had some Perl or Ruby, or maybe crazy folks had some C or something, but it really felt that Python was generally the one ring to rule them all. I leaned into Python, and, like many folks, I quickly fell in love. Python is a really neat language, and for somebody like me, without any kind of programming or computer science background, it served as an amazing and reasonably gentle introduction to the world of software.

For a good long while, I kind of felt like the network automation folks espousing Go were living in a fantasy land! Why would you need anything other than Python? Certainly,...