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Six years of Go

blog.golang.org

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Re: Six years of Go

#131

Post by agentultra »

hahainternet wrote: post #38
johnydepp wrote: post #37

I tried Goland for two of my personal projects. Initially I thought I will get used to the new syntax, but it never happened. It may have certain performance-edge over other languages but I wouldn't call it a modern language. I find coding in C more fun than Golang..

I picked up Go because C frustrated me so much. Can you give some examples as to why you prefer C?

Not the author...

I prefer C99. A smattering of features I like:

  * Variable Length Arrays
  * Variadic Macros
  * Designated Initializers
  * Anonymous Structs
  * Compound Literals
Some of the meta-"features" I like:

  * No built-in runtime or GC
  * A choice of dynamic vs static compilation
  * A good libc is wonderful but not necessary to get work done fast
  * The tooling is mature and plentiful
I'm sure Go is a fine language. I probably suffer from some sort of first-language bias as I've been using C for a long time and only know a smattering of Go from toy programs, blog posts, and reading the source to interesting projects like CockroachDB.

Re: Six years of Go

#132

Post by coldtea »

vox_mollis wrote: post #127
coldtea wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It was early 2013, when we adopted Go as a default language for all our server side (micro or not) services. (...) The reason for the move were few: 1) Ambivalence on Java roadmap So, because there was some "ambivalence for the Java roadmap", a language with multiple implementations, a huge community (including open source), and so entrenched in the industry that will be there in 2100 too, you switched to a 3-4 yea…

and whose majority of development depends on a handful of people Google pays their salaries As opposed to the brilliant stewardship of Larry Ellison?

Well, still not a handful of people, but a huge endeavour, and with a published roadmap for 2 versions ahead.

Besides even if Larry said "kill it" tomorrow, Java would still survive -- so much that it's used in all kinds of enterprises.

Re: Six years of Go

#133

Post by dejawu »

cubano wrote: post #66
dejawu wrote: post #51

Started using Go for my latest project (a successor to Evernote). It feels like such a relief, especially having just come out of a node.js project. It's everything I wanted in a (web-app) programming language, and for the first time I can say that a language has actually made my code better. I've never had a codebase this clean before.

I don't mean to be snarky and I'm definitely showing my age here, but isn't that exactly what devs were saying about node.js two years ago?

For what it's worth, I moved to node.js late and even then only reluctantly. I only used it for one project, and found it to be a somewhat difficult experience, like I was fighting the language all the time. (It was still a step up from PHP which I'd been clinging to.)

I didn't realize how much I disliked JS playing "loose and fast" until I used Go with its rigidity.

Re: Six years of Go

#134

Post by dilap »

zaphar wrote: post #113
cubano wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't mean to be snarky and I'm definitely showing my age here, but isn't that exactly what devs were saying about node.js two years ago?

I can't remember anyone ever claiming javascript/node made their code cleaner. Speed and throughput were claims but not code quality.

I've been coding since forevs, and I really do feel like Go pushes you to keep clean code. Maybe the language, but a lot of it's just culture and leading by example.

Every time I peak into the source of a standard Go package, I'm blown away by how clean and simple the code is -- and it's a fantastic way to gain a deeper understanding of the language.

That has mostly not been my experience diving into std C library code, or quasi-standard stuff like boost...

Re: Six years of Go

#135

Post by drumdance »

coldtea wrote: post #102
aws_ls wrote: post #64

It was early 2013, when we adopted Go as a default language for all our server side (micro or not) services. Before that we had been using Java for some years. The reason for the move were few: 1) Ambivalence on Java roadmap, in my understanding (gradual build up, since after the Oracle's Sun acquisition). Even the earlier clean java docs, suffered from Oracle branding efforts. Downloading older versions were confusi…

> It was early 2013, when we adopted Go as a default language for all our server side (micro or not) services. (...) The reason for the move were few: 1) Ambivalence on Java roadmap So, because there was some "ambivalence for the Java roadmap", a language with multiple implementations, a huge community (including open source), and so entrenched in the industry that will be there in 2100 too, you switched to a 3-4 yea…

Ha. I built my first company on Java back in 1996. It was a terrible decision. Very buggy, lots of BS from Sun & Oracle that was really more about Ellison and McNealy envying Bill Gates. Netscape made a similarly bad decision when they tried to create a pure Java version of the browser.

I'm sure Java is 10x better now, but I'm not convinced it will be here in 2100.

Re: Six years of Go

#136

Post by dilap »

benreic wrote: post #112

I'm surprised to not see any mention in the comments about the biggest change coming in 1.6: the package vendoring mechanism. This has been a big missing piece for awhile and I'm glad they're addressing it in an official way. I was super excited for the cross compilation abilities on Go 1.5 and now I have something else to be super excited for in Go 1.6, can't wait!

I was confused by that. Is this going to be any different than GO15VENDOREXPERIMENT which we have now?

Re: Six years of Go

#137

Post by dejawu »

thebouv wrote: post #60
dejawu wrote: post #51

Started using Go for my latest project (a successor to Evernote). It feels like such a relief, especially having just come out of a node.js project. It's everything I wanted in a (web-app) programming language, and for the first time I can say that a language has actually made my code better. I've never had a codebase this clean before.

I understand the basics of Go, but do you have any advice on where to start using it for web app development? Any framework that you're using (if one at all)?

I've picked out the following that I like:

- Gorp[1] for SQL stuff (I like that it "encourages" your program data structure to reflect your DB structure) - amber[2] for templating - gorilla/mux[3] for routing - gorilla/securecookie[4] for login/auth management (they have a sessions and context library too if you want that)

Go also has libraries that handle basic versions of most of these tasks (and these third-party libraries extend them). If you're building something simple they might be sufficient.

[1] https://github.com/go-gorp/gorp [2] https://github.com/eknkc/amber/ [3] http://www.gorillatoolkit.org/pkg/mux [4] http://www.gorillatoolkit.org/pkg/securecookie

Re: Six years of Go

#138

Post by artursapek »

coldtea wrote: post #126
ohto wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is fairly clear by now that omitting generics is not an oversight, but rather a design choice. If you disagree, it sounds like Go isn't for you. Maybe it's time to just move on and ignore it instead of beating a dead horse. I am always confused by the push to make every language exactly the same by using the same paradigms and features. Some languages try to take a different approach. If you can't figure out how t…

> I am always confused by the push to make every language exactly the same by using the same paradigms and features. More like: some paradigms and features have been proved useful, and experienced programmers ask for them in a language that lacks them. And not indiscriminately, but usually only ask for them if that language is of a certain paradigm / family of languages were those things fit well with (e.g. few ask f…

Please just stop. This is not an objective issue. I for one have spent the last 2 years using Go to build a very performant system which is used by thousands of Bitcoin day traders every day. It's fast, stable, and easy to modify. I have never felt held back by a lack of generics.

And yes, I've spent plenty of time using languages that do support generics. It can save you time but I've found it also enables "looser" code, which can be more error-prone. In fact one of my favorite things about Go is how restrictive its type system is. I feel a lot more confident about my code doing only what I think it's doing when using Go.

If they find a way to introduce generics while upholding Go's other strong points (fast compilation being another), then great. But it looks like it's not trivial.

If the language is not for you, move on. There are plenty of us who are perfectly happy to write code without generics. Your condescending remarks are entirely unproductive.

Re: Six years of Go

#139

Post by tptacek »

kasey_junk wrote: post #97
tptacek wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with you, but there is something to the argument; it's just poorly phrased as "getting things done". gofmt, for instance, is uncontroversial. Taking the decisions about how to format code away from developers and standardizing it is widely seen as a win (a win Python flirts with as well). Well, there's a lot of other things in Go that have been pre-decided for you, not just the formatting. The net effect is t…

I think that falls into my use case of "simple". If you don't need to make those kinds of decisions, then by definition your problem set is simple (at least from a business logic point of view, even simple business problems get complex at scale). The problem, I have with the sentiment (which I grant is largely me over reading into it) is that a lot of the things people think of as noodling or a waste of time, are the…

I think you're missing a subtlety of my argument. I'm not saying you never need to pick a container that isn't a simple hash table, or design a DSL, or roll your own event loop, or design a hierarchy of abstractions. I've done all of those things in Golang --- even the event loop!

But in C++, those are decisions you might make in parsing a config file, or in managing a simple table of sessions, or adding an LRU cache to something. You can't get away from the decisions. I have an array of stuff, and I have to decide, "do I want a list, an slist, a vector, or a deque, and what the fuck is a deque?". 98% of the time there is one sane decision that is so close to optimal that it's not worth tinkering with.

In Go, for prosaic, routine code, those decisions have been made for you. You have to go just annoyingly enough out of your way to second-guess those decisions that you almost never do, and you're almost always better off for not having to do it.

Re: Six years of Go

#140

Post by brobinson »

japhyr wrote: post #87

I've never used Go before, so I went to the project's home page. There's an editing window on the home page with a sample program showing, and a few other programs available in a drop down list. I couldn't help but start playing with the language. I wonder how much the simple presence of an editing window on a language's home page contributes to overall adoption of the language. It sure lowers the bar to "I'll just w…

Rust has a similar feature on its homepage: https://www.rust-lang.org

Let's hope this becomes a trend!

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