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Why Go Is Not Good (2014)

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Re: Why Go Is Not Good (2014)

#271

Post by thegeekpirate »

mrcwinn wrote: post #207
cmrdporcupine wrote: post #2

While many of these points (on generics especially) are completely legitimate, this article will fall on deaf ears. My impression of the Go community (both within Google and outside of it) is that there is a very ... moralistic? .... sense of "You don't really need that, we know best" going on. It aims to be a pragmatic language. But IMHO the anemic nature of the type system is a practical handicap that they have mad…

I wouldn't call myself part of the Go community in any real way. There are people doing much more than I am. I personally like Go. We use Go at Creative Market (and do so increasingly). I will say the my impression of Rob Pike and some members of the community is that they just put on earmuffs and say, "no, you're doing it wrong, you don't need that" (generics). I think this article clearly demonstrates that working…

No one says you don't need generics. Here's rsc explaining why it's not in the language: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9622417

No piece of feedback is ignored, I'm not sure how you've gotten that idea.

Re: Why Go Is Not Good (2014)

#272

Post by steven2012 »

I hate blog posts like this.

It sounds like the author wants to turn Go into Java or Haskell. If that's what the author's preference is, then just use Java or Haskell. I don't even use Go, but to me this post is simply just whining, but the author doesn't appear to understand the fundamental reason of how or why Go was designed.

The creators of Go made opinionated decisions on how the language would behave. Generics weren't left out because of oversight or accident, that was a conscious decision. Everything in his list was a conscious decision. Go is one of the most opinionated languages out there, and it's definitely not flexible to do whatever everyone wants. If you don't like it, then use another language. It's pretty simple.

Re: Why Go Is Not Good (2014)

#273

Post by sgt »

mike_hearn wrote: post #202
fromMars wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Java's verbosity makes me want to puke. Go wins over java on this point alone. I wish go had generics, but, overall, I enjoy writing Go, because I can do most of the things I did in java while feeling like I am writing python. I like other languages like Haskell (haven't looked at Rust), but I can't use it on the projects for a variety of reasons.

Modern Java (e.g. 8+) would seem to be much less verbose than Go, as well as being more type safe, once you take the if (err != nil) boilerplate that seems to infest all Go code into account. If you didn't do any Java for 10 years then maybe Go looks good in comparison, but I don't see how with the modern stuff, especially when you compare IDEs, debuggers, profilers and other tools. But if you want something much mor…

Agreed. "fromMars" should really take a look at Java 8 which is a lot more pragmatic and powerful than the Java of the past.

Re: Why Go Is Not Good (2014)

#274

Post by tjholowaychuk »

amelius wrote: post #149

The ugliest part of Go, imho, is that in some situations it may appear as if nil != nil. See for example the confusion in [1], and for an explanation, [2] [1] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/21460787/nil-slice-when-p... [2] https://golang.org/doc/faq#nil_error

I'd have to agree! Some little quirks like this sort of make sense after they're explained but they're certainly not intuitive. Assignability is another that I find awkward, I had to dig around to find the reasoning behind named/unnamed types being handled the way they are.

Re: Why Go Is Not Good (2014)

#275

Post by parenthephobia »

kentor wrote: post #262
innocentoldguy wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think a language's popularity has anything to do with it being a good, well-thought-out language. Just look at Javascript.

Javascript is pretty good.

Counterpoint: Javascript is pretty bad.

There is a brilliant language that looks like Javascript that is the language you might be thinking of when you say "Javascript is pretty good". Unfortunately, that language only exists in people's heads.

In practice, Javascript is full of crazy weird edge cases where it is required to behave in an insane manner because the browser vendors have all been juggling the idiot ball amongst themselves when implementing it.

e.g. https://medium.com/@daffl/javascript-the-weird-parts-8ff3da5...

Re: Why Go Is Not Good (2014)

#276

Post by banku_brougham »

Retric wrote: post #121
laumars wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think some of that stems from the fact that the arguments against Go are often over emphasised matters of personal preference, or just so frequently raised that it becomes tiresome to read. I love Go. I know it's an imperfect language and because of that I do often hate specific Go idioms. So I definitely don't have a "bunker mentality" when it comes to Go; nor any other language. But in terms of "getting stuff don…

In the end there is no one true best language out there. Go is great for a subset of problems and making it better at other things is a balancing act. The most popular languages are generally accidents of history. Unix gave us C, browsers gave us JavaScript, and Databases gave us SQL, etc.

I'm not understanding SQL as an accident of history, can you explain?

Re: Why Go Is Not Good (2014)

#277

Post by jshen »

sanderjd wrote: post #238
jshen wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that there is no empirical evidence to support any of the claims. Even looking at generics, the limited studies I've see show that generics make people a little more productive when using a generic library, but far less productive when trying to write a generic library. In short, these are entirely anecdotal and subjective points of view, so after the 1000th person says, "you are stupid, generics are a…

I agree with a lot of this, but where things get muddy with empirical evidence, is that it implies a certain "default". In this case that can either be something like "generics are useful" or something like "not having generics is useful". I don't think either hypothesis is supported by much of the sort of empirical evidence you're looking for. Basically, I share your sense that this is all anecdotal and subjective,…

There is no rigor to this blog post. He didn't have two teams build the same project with and without generics or anything like that.

The title is "why go is not good" which is drawing a conclusion based on an anecdote. It's the equivalent of walking outside in December, stating that it's cold, then drawing the conclusion that the globe isn't warming.

Re: Why Go Is Not Good (2014)

#278

Post by cobaltblue »

ensignavenger wrote: post #166
cletus wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Go was never a systems programming language as soon as it made the decision to be garbage collected. Don't get me wrong: in many cases I like GC but you'll never dethrone C/C++ for many use cases with a GC language. I find it interesting that many Go pundits I speak to just don't seem to get this. I wouldn't even say Go's target market is Java. I'd say it's actually Python. Rob Pike has spoken about this [1]. I like…

Why do you need to write unit tests for spelling mistakes and typos in Python?

It's one class of errors that doesn't typically happen with a static compiled language, people like to feel 'safe' about the dullest things but typos can be found pretty easily by running the code you just wrote in a REPL or at least structuring your application so that you can quickly get it to the same state to test live... But honestly you can just repeat the typos in your tests, or make new ones, in any case for me at least it's a class of error that comes up very rarely regardless of whether I'm using mitigations like auto-complete. And lastly I'd think if you were unit testing "properly", aiming for good coverage, which unit testing advocates will say you must do regardless of a static or dynamic language, your unit tests should catch various typos as a side-benefit. Testing things like int in -> int out or "reading this function it calls these methods on foo, here's a mock foo and we're just going to make sure all of them get called as expected and I didn't misread/mistype either the code or the test code" seems insane.

Re: Why Go Is Not Good (2014)

#279

Post by parenthephobia »

bluepill wrote: post #221

there we Go again. why spend time writing about something you don't like? Is it a therapy for programmers with strong opinions?

It is possible to like things but not think they are perfect.

Every time Go has ever gotten better was because somebody who liked it thought it could be improved.

Re: Why Go Is Not Good (2014)

#280

Post by thegeekpirate »

innocentoldguy wrote: post #248
gendoikari wrote: post #3

We'll see in the next few years... We'll see...

I don't think a language's popularity has anything to do with it being a good, well-thought-out language. Just look at Javascript.

Javascript is a very poor analogy since it's been grandfathered into our workflow, and has coincidentally been shoehorned into being workable, at the very least.
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