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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

#101

Post by warent »

weberc2 wrote: post #84
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…

Google doesn't invest heavily in Go. It almost certainly invests more in JS, Python, Java, and C++. I think the difference is philosophical--Go doesn't pretend that every obscure edge case deserves equal support to the main case, and so its tooling is much simpler.

I'm not sure where you get your information from, but Google definitely invests a substantial amount in Go.

- Paid some of the most celebrated engineers to work on it full time. - Support it as a first class language in GCP - Support it as a first class language internally

If you want to see a language Google doesn't invest much into, look at Dart

Re: Why Go is my favorite programming language

#102

Post by warent »

wasted_intel wrote: post #33
grey-area wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

Go can handle errors in a very deterministic way, and it can easily recover from a weird panicked state. If someone's Go code has "runtime errors abound" then they probably didn't RTFM ;)

Re: Why Go is my favorite programming language

#103

Post by [deleted] »

kazinator wrote: post #97
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…

> language ergonomics, power, etc are less important than having a standard batteries included development stack To programmers under twenty five. And that explains not only Go, but volumes of computing history.

[deleted]

Re: Why Go is my favorite programming language

#104

Post by hellcow »

kuschku wrote: post #88
hellcow wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Use dep, which they're planning to add to the official tools like 'go get'. Then add your vendor directory to your gitignore, and you're done.

I don’t want a vendor directory in the first place, how do I avoid that? I want it to just automatically do its stuff just like maven/gradle/sbt work, and not deal with any damn dependencies. I want it to automatically set the dependency path, and handle incremental compiles. If people claim it has so much better tooling than Java, then I expect at least it to work as well as Java’s tooling.

I'm trying to understand your complaint.

Obviously you'll need a vendor directory somewhere containing the source code of your dependencies. Maven places them outside the project's root dir (defaults to ~/.m2/repository), whereas Go puts them inside the project's root dir. Tomato-tomato. They have to exist on your system somewhere.

Re: Why Go is my favorite programming language

#105

Post by burntsushi »

masklinn wrote: post #94
Denzel wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

interface{} carries runtime type information in its internal double-word (type + pointer) structure, unlike void*.

Distinction without a difference, talk about Object if you prefer, the only difference is that downcasts are runtime-checked, it remains a huge hole into the typesystem.

> Distinction without a difference

This seems pretty misleading to me. Sure, it's a hole in the type system, but not a hole in memory safety, unlike void*.

(Even the fact that it's a hole in the type system isn't particularly interesting. Most languages have holes in their type systems, by design. What's important is the amount of use it gets, which is of course somewhat-frequent in Go. Same with void in C, so at the type system level, I agree that there isn't too much to distinguish other than quibbling about frequency of use.)

Re: Why Go is my favorite programming language

#106

Post by snuxoll »

jasode wrote: post #77
Merovius wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Golang can have less keywords, because it has less features. So, you are saying… because it's less complex?

No. I don't think Golang is "less complex" because it has less features than ABAP _if_ you plan to use Golang to write GUI applications that interact with databases to track enterprise data of sales, purchase orders, manufacturing, inventory control etc. "Complexity" is not a useful label unless you look at what you're actually building: - If the goal is to show "hello world" , yes Golang is "simpler". - If the goal…

This is the same reason I rolled out Salesforce for a couple workflow apps for a few teams in our company.

I could bootstrap a .Net/Java/whatever app to do the same thing, but our team is swamped with a backlog years long - I could only afford a couple days to develop and release this so a dozen Force.com licenses ended up saving tons on development and ongoing maintenance costs.

Re: Why Go is my favorite programming language

#107

Post by fnl »

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…

Go is an alternative for C (for services), PHP, and server-side JS. I don't understand why people keep comparing it to languages like C++, C#, D, Java, Rust, or Scala. The problems these two sets of languages solve are fundamentally different.

Re: Why Go is my favorite programming language

#108

Post by dougbarrett »

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.

To me, the language really is so great. I've discussed this with a friend, but in my 4.5 yrs of using it in production environments I've never found myself held back by the lack of generics. The apps I write need to be high availability, doing 1k req/sec on avg on one server, and go has never been the bottleneck.

I come from originally a PHP background, and for me to do a fraction of what Go can do would require me to go in and mess with php config files and spin up more servers in order to get the performance I need, and with Go that's just not the case.

Re: Why Go is my favorite programming language

#109

Post by infogulch »

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…

> I wish there were better languages that had such nice tooling

Have you considered that the reason why go has such great tooling is precisely because of its desperate grip on simplicity and non-configurability -- the very things you might call upon as why it's "bad".

Maybe this correlation is more than coincidental.

Re: Why Go is my favorite programming language

#110

Post by u320 »

jerf wrote: post #48
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…

"for all the deficiencies Go has, it is somehow highly compatible with the way my brain works." I have been tempted to write a blog post about "Why People Actually Can Write Real Programs In Go." To listen to HN complain about the language you'd think that it must be clearly impossible to ever write a program of any kind without massively copying and pasting everywhere, when in reality I find it's actually quite plea…

> I wrote some code that takes a list of servers to query for some particular thing, and it was easy to write it to do them all simultaneously

In javascript that would be:

  Promise.all(list_of_servers.map(query_server))
Other mainstream languages with similar concurrency primitives (pretty much all of them that either is dynamic or has generics) is similar. I don't think this is an area where Go shines.
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