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Why Go is my favorite programming language

michael.stapelberg.de

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Re: Why Go is my favorite programming language

#31

Post by jwilliams »

krylon wrote: post #21

I have said it before and I will say it again - for all the deficiencies Go has, it is somehow highly compatible with the way my brain works. One point the article does not mention is the documentation. I think Go's documentation is excellent, it does not overwhelm the reader with its volume, but mostly anything one might want to know about the syntax and semantic can be answered by carefully reading through the docu…

My background - self-taught in C, wrote BASIC to make money in High School, learned Java (and used professionally). Eventually ended up with Ruby (Rails). I developed my own LISP-like for many years.

Now most of my hobby programming is in Go. I really like it's connection to C. You feel the connection through to lower level programming. I also like the emphasis Go both emphasizes data structures and is first-class with functions. The combination of the two are really easy for me to navigate, but extremely expressive too.

It feels like a language that is very grounded in the fundamentals as I see them, but with a modern outlook and tooling. It feels amazing to write a web-based application with the power of C, but feeling confident you're not going to blow your own foot off every step of the way.

Re: Why Go is my favorite programming language

#32

Post by jernfrost »

wasted_intel wrote: post #5

The "easy to learn" argument is getting old. If the cognitive load never decreases, that's one thing, but initial ramp-up time shouldn't be a large determining factor. The MVC pattern, ADTs, functional programming, and so many other useful concepts were foreign at first, but have a substantial impact on how you think and work. With the exception of channels, Go doesn't add much when compared to other languages. Maybe…

It matters for large teams and when you got hundreds of languages to choose from. I am sure Haskell is great but after a couple of weeks studying it I realize I don't have time for something I don't know if will pay off or not. In contrast with Go you can see benefits almost immediatly

Re: Why Go is my favorite programming language

#33

Post by wasted_intel »

grey-area wrote: post #24
wasted_intel wrote: post #5

The "easy to learn" argument is getting old. If the cognitive load never decreases, that's one thing, but initial ramp-up time shouldn't be a large determining factor. The MVC pattern, ADTs, functional programming, and so many other useful concepts were foreign at first, but have a substantial impact on how you think and work. With the exception of channels, Go doesn't add much when compared to other languages. Maybe…

With the exception of channels, Go doesn't add much when compared to other languages. It doesn't add things, it takes them away, notably exceptions, inheritance, generics. I disagree that's short sighted, it's precisely for long term maintenance that it becomes important to have less ways to do things. You may not agree with the choices, but they are not only about being easy to learn, more about being easy to read.

People just end up inventing idioms to handle those, anyway. Go's nil-check error handling is a prime example. That's a beautifully solved problem with ADTs, but it's impossible without generic support, for starters. Runtime errors, abound!

Re: Why Go is my favorite programming language

#34

Post by jwilliams »

kasey_junk wrote: post #12

If I were to build a list of the reasons I use go, it wouldn't be terribly different than this one. But interestingly, while I program go every day, I sort of hate it as a language. You'll note this list doesn't actually have much to do with the language per se, the only point directly related to that is that go has a short list of reserved words (which is true of most languages). So for future language designers (or…

> go has a short list of reserved words

I use go a lot now. However, I must admit I find the use of interface{} "aka empty interface, aka void*" a weird one. It's technically correct, but it's an odd semantic.

Re: Why Go is my favorite programming language

#35

Post by dozzie »

grey-area wrote: post #24
wasted_intel wrote: post #5

The "easy to learn" argument is getting old. If the cognitive load never decreases, that's one thing, but initial ramp-up time shouldn't be a large determining factor. The MVC pattern, ADTs, functional programming, and so many other useful concepts were foreign at first, but have a substantial impact on how you think and work. With the exception of channels, Go doesn't add much when compared to other languages. Maybe…

With the exception of channels, Go doesn't add much when compared to other languages. It doesn't add things, it takes them away, notably exceptions, inheritance, generics. I disagree that's short sighted, it's precisely for long term maintenance that it becomes important to have less ways to do things. You may not agree with the choices, but they are not only about being easy to learn, more about being easy to read.

> It doesn't add things, it takes them away, notably exceptions, inheritance, generics.

s/exceptions/error handling/

What Go proposes is awful for a modern language.

Re: Why Go is my favorite programming language

#36

Post by weberc2 »

squeeeeeeeeeee wrote: post #22

I haven't looked at Go yet, but all these "is so easy to learn" and "generics are bad because they're not easy to learn" articles on HN, I have to wonder if this language is really so great or people push it because of the politics of people making it.

While I do like that Go is ready to learn, I like that it is small enough to hold in my head. Pretty much everything works intuitively, save for a couple surprises. The same goes for its tooling. There is no complex project or package tooling to learn either.

That said, it doesn't have a passable story for sum types or generics, which are important for the kind of programs I write these days. I'm convinced that summertime could build something as simple as Go, but with better abstraction facilities. Ideally this language would look like Rust and compile to Go.

Re: Why Go is my favorite programming language

#37

Post by styfle »

sandGorgon wrote: post #7

I'm kind of wondering about why is there no production ready JavaScript/TS to exe compiler that packages all dependencies and creates a single executable - like go. With the amount of mind share that js ecosystem has, I thought that would be a thing. The keyword being "all dependencies"

A couple more:

https://github.com/nexe/nexe

https://github.com/pmq20/node-compiler

Re: Why Go is my favorite programming language

#39

Post by holydude »

emperorcezar wrote: post #15
wasted_intel wrote: post #5

The "easy to learn" argument is getting old. If the cognitive load never decreases, that's one thing, but initial ramp-up time shouldn't be a large determining factor. The MVC pattern, ADTs, functional programming, and so many other useful concepts were foreign at first, but have a substantial impact on how you think and work. With the exception of channels, Go doesn't add much when compared to other languages. Maybe…

Sadly our entire industry is based around being short sighted. Quick to learn is only important if you have the lack of patience to spend the time to learn something you'll be using for years.

Our industry is hugely based on illusions and misconceptions. There are only few places on earth where people regularly rebuild the skyscrapers to build taller ones. The IT industry simply forces you to re-learn the same old paradigms in a new package just to gain 0.1% of something we cannot even define as an improvement.

Re: Why Go is my favorite programming language

#40

Post by int08h »

steinuil wrote: post #20

I really dislike Go as a language, it has very few means of abstraction and it feels depressing that people think you have to throw out decades of PLT research to achieve perceived clarity like this. That said, these reasons are almost all linked to tooling, which is something that I have to admit Go gets right, but they're not intrinsically linked to the language itself and its feature minimalism. I wish there were…

Re: getting tooling "right" and that driving adoption/popularity.

I'll argue that Java and the JVM are very similar in this respect. Few will argue Java is a "good" language and the JVM has many shortcomings.

However the ecosystem of IDEs, JVM tools, and decades of big company investment (Sun, IBM, Oracle) have created an amazingly productive environment.

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