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Why Go gets criticized so much

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Re: Why Go gets criticized so much

#101

Post by luchadorvader »

jhall1468 wrote: post #42
pjc50 wrote: post #18

People who dislike X are upset because they incorporated their favourite Y into their identity, and the success of X challenges their own choices. True for football teams, political parties, games consoles, superhero franchises, religions, food choices, colour schemes, preferred spelling variants, ...

Sometimes, sure. But none of those are our jobs (except if you are a football player, politician, etc). Computer programming languages are our jobs. It's okay to have preferences. I (a full time front-end webdev), think Python is probably the best language out there. But it doesn't define me, because that's just silly.

I agree that a language doesn't define you but what I wonder if a person's favorite language has some correlation to certain personality traits. I would be lieing if I didn't say I get more enjoyment from some languages where other people don't. Perl vs Python for example, pythons core values are to try and make it only one way to achieve something, whereas Perl tries to give you multiple ways to achieve something. I would guess that Perl may appeal more to artistic people and Python would appeal to more engineering type of people. This isn't a claim, more just something I think would be interesting to investigate.

Re: Why Go gets criticized so much

#102

Post by gizmo »

dozzie wrote: post #72
gizmo wrote: post #28

I think there is a better explanation for why people dislike Go. All programming languages currently used for the web have gigantic downsides. They're slow. They have terrible package management. They have poor standard libraries. They have no static typing. They have no visual debuggers. They have no good IDE support. They don't integrate well with frontend code. Some programming languages are more flawed than other…

> Then Google announces Go. A cross-platform systems programming languages for high quality web services. Did they actually advertise it as a language for web services? I thought it was designed for command line tools mostly, not for serving HTTP/HTML.

Looks like you're right. This is the original announcement: http://google-opensource.blogspot.com/2009/11/hey-ho-lets-go...

Re: Why Go gets criticized so much

#103

Post by cballard »

sievebrain wrote: post #83
cballard wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Decent" is being very kind to any language that has a type system where every reference type is implicitly a Maybe (okay, Scala exists).

Go and Scala also allow every pointer to be null, no? Scala has an option type, but so does Java 8. Defining one in C# is easy. But there is Ceylon, Kotlin, Clojure, whatever. Kotlin uses ? suffixes to define if something is optional. And at least the code interops nicely. You can inherit a huge Java codebase and slowly convert the code over. No such luck with Go. Unless you're converting into C!

C# and Java optionals aren't very useful, since they would be reference types themselves, and thus could be null!

I would submit Rust and Swift as "decent" type systems, if Haskell is the standard for "good". They do nullability correctly, but lack HKTs.

Re: Why Go gets criticized so much

#104

Post by infogulch »

bsaul wrote: post #59
gizmo wrote: post #28

I think there is a better explanation for why people dislike Go. All programming languages currently used for the web have gigantic downsides. They're slow. They have terrible package management. They have poor standard libraries. They have no static typing. They have no visual debuggers. They have no good IDE support. They don't integrate well with frontend code. Some programming languages are more flawed than other…

I can really relate to your post. I heard about go at a time when i was angry against python for having no type hinting and started to see people build tools parsing types in code comments, and at the same time being furious against the gigantic bloat that the java enterprise web frameworks had become. So, as you said, when i looked at go being a smart and small with a modern standard lib, and being modern in a way w…

Why would you even want that? I mean, I've heard the generics argument before, and I'll accept that they are important for some applications (esp custom data structures). But lack of a generic `Cmp` is the straw that broke the camel's back?

Re: Why Go gets criticized so much

#105

Post by sievebrain »

spyspy wrote: post #96
sievebrain wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The issue is not "is the code maintainable" or "does Go lead to unmaintainable code". The issue is, do I wish to spend my days debugging code and writing more code, in Go? I used languages with Go's limitations back in the 1990's. I don't want to go back.

Writing and debugging code in Go is extremely more pleasurable than debugging, say, python. I write Go all day while our data scientists write python. Unfortunately python gives those guys enough rope to hang themselves and me too. It's simply harder (not impossible of course) to write unmaintainable code in a limited, static language like go.

Yeah, I wouldn't want to maintain a large Python codebase either.

Re: Why Go gets criticized so much

#106

Post by jrobn »

One of Go's selling points is always it's a pragmatic language. But after using it for awhile and implementing a few web apps and APIs in it. I've crossed it off my list for web app or API development. It's great at making standalone CLI tools, however.

I've since moved to using Elixir (erlang) for web app stuff (even some scripts) and I am much happier. I'm not in love with Elixirs syntax, but it's nice and includes meta programming. Elixir is a much more pragmatic language in my opinion. Once you use things like pattern matching (what could be more pragmatic) you can't go back. Raw performance is nothing to write home about but in my use cases elixir does a great job of hitting the sweet spot.

Re: Why Go gets criticized so much

#107

Post by akhilcacharya »

Gonzih wrote: post #49

I did not like go until I tried it out on small pet project. Now I know how to enjoy it.

Same. I hated the idea of it before I started to use it and started to use some of the tooling (like goimports, gocode, etc) with the go-plus package on Atom.

I think tooling really makes the difference in this case.

Re: Why Go gets criticized so much

#108

Post by sakopov »

gizmo wrote: post #64
sievebrain wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"All" languages used for the web have those downsides? This is part of why Go culture scares me a bit. You seem to be overlooking the huge amounts of software written in .NET and on the JVM, none of which suffers from the problems you just outlined: there are great IDEs, decent type systems, good interactive debuggers, strong standard libraries, reasonable package management etc. This mental blind spot towards the to…

I deliberately didn't mention specific programming languages because I knew that would lead to bickering about the relative merits of Python vs Java vs .NET vs Clojure, which would just distract from the greater point. Your curious assertion that I'm somehow part of "Go culture" only confirms this. I think we can do a lot better than .NET or Java. .NET isn't even cross platform and Java has a lot of legacy cruft. Not…

So much bias in this thread in general. Have you missed the news on .Net Core?

Re: Why Go gets criticized so much

#109

Post by woodcut »

I've been working in Go now for over a year and its honestly made my day-to-day life as a software engineer enjoyable. What gets me down about working in this industry is toiling away on products only to never see them released or being frustrated by absurd compile times, poorly tested components and abstract cathedral architectures. I worked on large C++ projects for around 7 years and i don't care for another flame war about curly brackets or which reimagining of a string is more ascetic. I also worked in Ocaml and some Erlang and yeah while great in principle they lacked the out-the-box tooling and standardisation of practice that I absolutely love about Go.

If someone creates a ML variant with a day-to-day experience as clarified as Go then I will gladly jump on board.

Re: Why Go gets criticized so much

#110

Post by Lewisham »

Disclaimer: I work at El Goog.

I recently moved teams so that I could use Go exclusively. It's often been said that Go solves the problems Google developers have, and it's 110% true. It's much easier to get things working, and it's much easier to write things like Protocol Buffers. But the key for me is that Go isn't fun in the sense of "wow, I'm so smart that I managed to one line this thing", it's fun in the "wow I read this code and I can understand what's happening and hack on it to do something else."

I've worked on teams with monolithic Java code, and it's nigh-on impossible to understand what's happening and where you are in the logic flow. I don't have that problem in Go. I even delve into the standard libraries to see how the original Go devs did something, and I both understand it and think it looks like code I would have written too. I never get that feeling from any other language, where I feel like the standard libs are written by hyper-intelligent aliens.

When I exclaimed this internally, I got the sarky comment "It's almost as if the things Go leaves out makes it easier". And that's the core of it. Would I like generics? Sure; I do miss map(). But that's it.

Go is opinionated. People that don't like Go don't share the opinion. That's OK. It's taken me a long time to realize there is no One True Language that can do everything (it was soon after steveklabnik said something along the lines of "I don't know why you'd want to write a web app in Rust"). Once you get there, you won't hate Go anymore, nor indeed any other language.

Apart from C++. Screw that ;)

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