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

I wouldn't call it a grand plan, but it is one of Google's five officially supported server languages and as a result there's a lot of work being done to build tools and libraries for it. Code generation and relying on language-agnostic building and packaging systems (bazel) are both pretty common Google-isms, which show how the company's development culture influenced the priorities and direction of the language.

It seems like everyone wants to believe they have Google-shaped problems, and thus should mimic Google in as many ways as they possibly can. Is some component of it that? Whether or not it's part of some grand plan?

This happens in hiring practices, in programming languages, in infrastructure tech, in data tech, etc.

It's extremely rare to encounter a data scale problem that actually requires a Hadoop-ish deployment, but they're all over the place. It's extremely rare to encounter an ops infrastructure that requires a scale and complexity where Kubernetes-ish tools make sense, but they're all over the place.

I admittedly don't fully understand the point of Go (as in existentially). I have used it, and will assuredly have to keep using it based on its increasing popularity. But it's not as good as Erlang for reliability or supporting production tools (services use cases). It's not as good as Rust or Haskell for implementation assurance (safety/security use cases). It's not as good for numerical processing as Julia or Fortran (scientific/performance use cases).

It feels a lot like the next generation of Java to me.

In that it's some shape of "good enough". And when "good enough" is combined with the cachet of aligning oneself with Google's ecosystem, it's basically unstoppable.

Currently not, as I only used it in smaller projects in the past.

In the future I’ll use it likely with QuasselDroid-NG, an app of mine that’s very early in development, and for which I developed it.

The use case there is that we have a list of IRC messages, constantly updating and adding messages at any point of the list, and we want to update the UI and animate.

The client can also cache, or preload, messages at any point, or throw them away.

Additionally, users can filter, search, or choose to disable some messages.

Other messages might get merged, or synthetic ones inserted.

So I have a backing store of messages that can constantly change, I have on top of that a stream of transformations taking part, and on top of that an interface presenting a single, consistent Java List, but also triggering the relevant updates on Android’s recyclerview.

Most importantly, you can just add a message to the lowest list, it will be properly filtered, transformed, animated, and displayed, and this properly threadsafe across UI thread, backend thread, and filtering threadpool, while being faster than the solutions Realms and co provide for such updated UI.

If it were node.js, I highly doubt I'd have a person coming out of the woodwork with cleverly placed quotes as if it's a legal threat.

Then blaming me for being biased as if you don't already have a conclusion derived. This is the behavior I experienced - to me, this feels like projection and trying to bully me into silencing what I truly witnessed. It really bothers me and makes me uncomfortable.

I'm just stating my experiences. You wanna know why I use a throwaway? Because people bully and bludgeon anyone who doesn't praise Haskell and / or Scala. And it's been unique to those language communities.

At the end of the day, your reaction is predictable. I'm not reading too deeply into what you say because, like my prior experiences, I think you have your mind up, and in spite or proof given, you're going to be on the defense / offense.

> Any ML-family compiler will catch more crap at compile time than any C compiler...

None of these things about language mattered since awesome and i3 had language as an afterthought and focused on experience. xmonad literally has haskell mentioned as a feature, the token battlestation pic (which is pretty cool) even has a haskell book next to it. Xmonad even uses haskell for the configuration of it.

Look, not trying to take a jab at hobbyists. It's just I'm saying, in my experience, I found Haskell and scala "hobbyists" to be quite mean and it hurt my feelings alot, especially when I dropped, far more politely than when they ever spoke to me, the news they're not focused on business goals and work product and just refactoring stuff over and over. They kind of failed at bringing product vision to light, even basic things like defining requirements felt beneath them. Again, maybe I've just been unlucky.

Good writeup, but not an unexpected conclusion. I'd be very interested to see a similar writeup by a Haskeller on Rust, since the two are closer in some aspects (static enforcement of behavior, strong typing, well designed concurrency), but different in other key ones (strict vs lazy, GC vs manual, etc).