Three Months of Go, from a Haskeller’s perspective (2016)

I cannot speak for Elixir, but coming from the Erlang world, I'm sure it's a fine language that has sane defaults, much like Clojure.

However I switched from Python to Scala and besides the performance issues and the poor handling of async I/O that I had with Python, by far the biggest problem with Python was all the insecurity while developing with it. It drove me insane, because we had a production system that always had problems due to how poorly Python's ecosystem treats errors.

Just to give an example, at that time we were using BeautifulSoup to do HTML parsing, a library resembling JQuery, except that BeautifulSoup can return nulls all over the place and no matter how defensive I got in my coding, null pointer exceptions still happened. And what was the solution for async I/O in Python? Monkey patching the socket module by means of Gevent or Eventlet of course, which didn't work for native clients (e.g. MySQL's) and if this wasn't problematic enough, you had to guess what worked or not and when. The worst kind of magic possible.

When I switched to Scala, all of these problems vanished. This isn't about having tests either, because tests only test for the behavior you can foresee, unless you do property-based testing with auto-generated random data and in this regard static languages like Scala and Haskell also rule due to the availability of QuickCheck / ScalaCheck.

You see, my Python codebase got really bad because of fear of refactoring. Yes, even with plenty of tests and good code coverage. Because actually the tests themselves became a barrier for refactoring, because in a language like Python there is no such thing as information hiding and coupled with dynamic typing, it means that your tests end up tightly coupled with implementation details, will break on correct refactoring and will be hard to fix.

Nowadays when I'm doing refactoring with Scala, most of the time it simply works as soon as the compiler is happy. Some people bitch and moan about that compiler being kind of slow and it is, but the things that it can prove about your code would require specialized and expensive tools for other languages and that wouldn't do such a good job.

Going back to dynamic languages, there are also languages like Clojure, which get by with sane defaults. For example in practice Clojure doesn't do OOP-style dynamic dispatching most of the time and functions are usually multi-variadic and capable of handling nil values gracefully. This is not enforced by the language, being simply a hygienic rule accepted by the community. However, relying on such conventions requires (a) capable developers that (b) agree on what the best practices should be.

And the issue that people miss when thinking of the merits of such languages is that smaller communities are always homogeneous. So when giving as example a language like Elixir, if it hasn't drove you insane yet, well, you have to take into account that Elixir might not be popular enough.

So basically I prefer strong static typing because I'm not smart enough or wise enough to seek and follow best practices as often as I'd like and because I don't have much faith that other people in the community can do that either, especially after that community grows. The biggest irony imo is that Python is right now the anti-thesis of TOOWTDI.

> Remember that Haskell is something like 25+ years old.

Yet, I'd argue that tooling is still one of the worst aspects of the language. The whole cabal/stack thing is a mess.

How robust/mature is it as of yet? More importantly, how are compile speeds and how much of a priority are they to the compiler maintainers? I too find it quite promising in terms of "a language aiming for the benefits of Go with the expressiveness and added easier correctness of FP".

But "promising" doesn't mean I'd replace the few use-cases where Go currently shines for me (wouldn't recommend it for any-and-all development at all, but there are select cases where I currently absolutely wouldn't use anything else) as these are those few programs where I really want to write (and later, read) exactly step-by-step "almost machine instructions" and where the only "expressiveness" needed is already fully afforded by Go and quite well at that. Dev-related mostly bulk-file-processing-based custom tooling (not bad to fire off sizable amounts of automatic background transformations from one weird format to another on file-system events etc.) .... filters through which to pipe vast/continuous data streams with just-some-processing over it .... providing out-of-process certain "low-level, must be lightning fast" tasks and logic with IPC for a higher-level codebase .... it's a great tool for such cases, especially given how simple the syntax is. Ie. the basics are grasped very easily very quickly and you don't have to recall "its pattern matching syntax and quirks, its generics syntax and quirks, its etc etc". =) I'm perplexed when teams choose to express their entire domain model or startup in Go, however.. fair game, maybe I'm missing something there

I don't understand. How can they not be comparable? They're the same type of tool, built with the same goal (writing any kind of software). In fact, Go itself was born because its creators felt the current languages weren't good at handling the current computing environment - comparisons with other languages are the at core of its existence. Finally, why even choose Go if it's not because it has some comparative advantage? Might as well stick with what we already know.