Why I’m Frustrated with Go • Hacker News Board

Re: Why I’m Frustrated with Go

#231

Post by candiodari » Fri, Jul 28, 2017, 8:51 PM UTC

atombender wrote: post #50

latch wrote: post #11

I did Go for years, but stopped doing any serious work in it about a year ago. In general, I found it a chore to maintain Go-based systems. There's a lot to like about Go. But it doesn't seem pragmatic for the types of applications I see people using it for. For example, the entire error thing is absurd. Anders Hejlsberg got this right many years ago: 9 out of 10 errors are "handled" by a central error handler (log +…

I don't like the "central exception handler" idea -- it is invariably too far away from the error site to do anything intelligent. I do like Erlang's approach with hierarchical error domains ("processes" and "supervisor trees"), and I honestly think Go made a mistake here: The semi-recent introduction of Context acknowledges that a control hierarchy is present and an important part of a concurrent, distributed applic…

last I heard the idea of "tombstoning" (guaranteed cancellation) in Go was impossible and given up on.

Re: Why I’m Frustrated with Go

#232

Post by weberc2 » Sat, Jul 29, 2017, 2:01 PM UTC

latch wrote: post #11

I did Go for years, but stopped doing any serious work in it about a year ago. In general, I found it a chore to maintain Go-based systems. There's a lot to like about Go. But it doesn't seem pragmatic for the types of applications I see people using it for. For example, the entire error thing is absurd. Anders Hejlsberg got this right many years ago: 9 out of 10 errors are "handled" by a central error handler (log +…

> I'm a huge fan of dynamic languages. I think they're so much more productive.

This hasn't been my experience. I work in Python (and JS) by day, and I can't wait until we upgrade to 3.6 so I can reasonably employ type annotations. Without them, people tend to write hacky code, such as functions which do completely different things based on the data type passed in (rather than fixing the abstraction) or build up huge, nested data structures with no formal definition (various parts of the code base just tack on whatever they like, and the documentation inevitably falls out of date). Even my prototyping is in Go, because I would rather have a compiler catch my errors than to spend tenfold the time trying to debug. Also, when I'm working in Python, I sorely miss the tooling that I have in Go and other static languages.

I don't think Go is the end-all-be-all of programming languages, but I think any dynamic language would be more productive if it was at least optionally typed.

Re: Why I’m Frustrated with Go

#233

Post by [deleted] » Sun, Jul 30, 2017, 5:54 PM UTC

rumcajz wrote: post #208

fnord123 wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, if you're in a GUI then you report to the user that an operation failed and it's up to them to figure out what they can do about it. As for infrastructural software, yes you want to handle errors in a more thoughtful manner. If you can't and the process has corrupted it's own stack or heap (in the case of C or C++) then sure, abort. But I'm saying this line is often chucked over to "log the exception and do not…

Yep. And lack of exceptions in languages like C or Go makes it harder to pretend you have done the right thing, if you in fact did not, given that it forces you handle every single error condition explicitly.

[deleted]