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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

#181

Post by wyager »

japano1se wrote: post #157
wyager wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "there are two types of languages, the ones everyone complains about, and the ones nobody uses" Of course Bjarne would say that. The reality is, there are some languages that people use a lot and don't complain about nearly as much. Some languages are just actually worse to use. http://andrewvos.com/2011/02/21/amount-of-profanity-in-git-c...

So of course, going by the logic of linking that article, we're all wasting our time and should just be using PHP?

Pleasantness of use is only one dimension. I think it makes sense to use C++ sometimes even though it's (evidently) relatively unpleasant.

Re: Why Go is my favorite programming language

#182

Post by riku_iki »

parenthephobia wrote: post #166
riku_iki wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are lighter options in java world, my dropwizard server with JDBI starts in 1.2sec.

I'm genuinely unsure if this is a joke. If you're running that on a modern computer, your server is spending billions of clock cycles starting up. What on Earth is it doing? :) If I write a Go server, I'm unhappy if it takes more than 0.2 seconds to start.

Depends what your server is doing, java app binded to http port will take probably same amount of time.

My dropwizard server contains almost all possible batteries: ssl, logging, http filters, static content, metrics, DB connection pooling, static content serving, all kinds of URL parameter parsing and URL routing, DI framework, ORM, thread pooling. I think it just inspects and initializes all this data structures in memory, load libraries and classes, etc.

Re: Why Go is my favorite programming language

#183

Post by kuschku »

weberc2 wrote: post #178
kuschku wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You're confused, Java's tooling is more complex/less intuitive. It doesn't matter where the dependency data lives on your system; it's completely transparent to you.

> It doesn't matter where the dependency data lives on your system; it's completely transparent to you.

Until some idiot checks it in on git despite the .gitignore (yes, this is possible, as I discovered after people accidentally did it).

Java’s tooling is far more intuitive. I don’t have to configure a GOPATH, or deal with go get or deps or stuff, I simply define my build.gradle.kts, do gradle build, and I’m done. I don’t have to care where dependencies are, or what transpilation steps are happening.

If I want to add a preprocessor, I import it the same way that I’d import a normal dependency, just with another directive – `compile 'com.jakewharton:butterknife:8.8.1'` vs `annotationProcessor 'com.jakewharton:butterknife-compiler:8.8.1'`.

This is something I really miss in the JS and Go and C and C++ world. It all just works.

Re: Why Go is my favorite programming language

#184

Post by logicallee »

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…

>But interestingly, while I program go every day, I sort of hate it as a language.

I would be interested in asking you to put some of these thoughts down. This can be contentious as it's matters of taste (i.e. I don't want others to reply to you defending it), so if you wanted you could email me - my contact is in my profile. Just a few thoughts -- i.e. what you had in mind when you wrote that -- would be really helpful for me.

What makes you hate the language?

Thanks so much for any thoughts.

Re: Why Go is my favorite programming language

#185

Post by DonbunEf7 »

treehau5 wrote: post #125
KirinDave wrote: post #120

> There is a cost to introducing an abstraction layer. Go code is usually rather clear, at the cost of being a bit repetitive at times. Go programmers say this a lot and every time I see it I wince. We've had all sorts of flights of fashion and fancy in the programming world, but one observation has emerged that seems closer to fact every time we test it: more code is more bugs. The more code you write, the more chan…

As Sandy Metz once said, "A little duplication is far better than the wrong abstraction." After a decade of OOP indoctrination and misuse, we see the results of this. > Go has popularized a mode of writing code where not only are abstractions unwelcome, but they're nearly impossible This lends me to believe you actually haven't written any go code for yourself. This is the same thing every OOP-indoctrinated developer…

Go is a uniquely rude language which both has over a dozen numeric types (seventeen from my reading of [0]) and also zero code reusability. I can't think of a better way to ruin any chances I might have of avoiding numeric bugs.

[0] https://golang.org/ref/spec

Re: Why Go is my favorite programming language

#186

Post by Xeoncross »

lobster_johnson wrote: post #165
Xeoncross wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love the error handling in Go. Every other language I've used led to the inevitable and useless "An error was encountered" message. Go is the first language where I can actually access the original socket permission error because it was actually passed up.

Pretty much every language has this: Java, Python, Ruby, Haskell, OCaml, C++... The only major language that I can think of that doesn't have a standard error propagation mechanism is C.

Have is different from use, in practice. I should say that In the real world Go libs actually pass the errors up while my experience with other languages has been shaking my head at the useless errors that I get back from the libs.

Re: Why Go is my favorite programming language

#187

Post by fauigerzigerk »

fnl wrote: post #173
fauigerzigerk wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The problems these two sets of languages solve are fundamentally different. I'm afraid I fail this intelligence test. What problems are solved by C, Go, PHP and server-side JS but not by any of Java, C++, C#, D, Rust or Scala (and vice versa)? This seems like a completely arbitrary classification to me.

Sorry, I had thought that it was quite obvious: JS, PHP, and Go are almost exclusively used for web-related tasks. Yes, one can find other usage examples, but by and large, that's their main field of application. To expand on this, imagine building some complex application framework with these web-oriented languages. Without decent abstractions and insufficient typed programming support (see e.g. TypeScript to JS tra…

PHP does indeed have features that make it more suitable for writing server side page templates, and JavaScript has a unique position in client side web development.

But I see very little in terms of features or problems they solve that distinguishes Java, JavaScript, Go, Scala and C# from each other when it comes to writing Web backends. It's essentially a cultural choice. So comparing them (and many others) is totally fair game in my opinion.

Re: Why Go is my favorite programming language

#188

Post by burntsushi »

pmoriarty wrote: post #111

When Java was first introduced, the world was abuzz about this cool new language which you could "write once, run anywhere". It took some time, but as it grew in popularity, articles started appearing about how much Java sucked because it was slow and bloated, required a ton of boilerplate code, and eventually because "write once, run anywhere" turned out to be a myth, along with a boatload of other reasons. The hone…

> Go was next. People were excited about this cool new language from Google, a place filled with great engineers, and from the mind of Rob Pike, of Unix and Plan 9 fame. It was supposed to be like a simpler and more elegant form of C. What's not to like. Well, the replies to this post are showing that for some the honeymoon is already over.

As someone who has paid attention to this since Go was released, there never was a honeymoon. The complaints in this thread have been the same exact complaints people have been lodging against Go since 1.0 was released.

What you're seeing is very simple to explain. Some people love Go. Some people like Go. Some people dislike Go. And some people hate Go.

Re: Why Go is my favorite programming language

#189

Post by KirinDave »

thesmallestcat wrote: post #127
KirinDave wrote: post #120

> There is a cost to introducing an abstraction layer. Go code is usually rather clear, at the cost of being a bit repetitive at times. Go programmers say this a lot and every time I see it I wince. We've had all sorts of flights of fashion and fancy in the programming world, but one observation has emerged that seems closer to fact every time we test it: more code is more bugs. The more code you write, the more chan…

Regarding your last paragraph, it's a reflection of the state of the industry. The vast majority of "software engineers"/"full stack developers" can't be bothered to learn new skills or improve their existing ones, so any popular programming tool is stuck catering to the least common denominator. Do you carefully review your own code? Do you voluntarily learn any new skill beyond "blog post intro tutorial" level? Do…

I talk to a lot of people new to the industry, both by way of my employer and my via University.

I have a hard time being this cynical. I think post-educational market forces drive this trend, not the personal inattentiveness that I sense (perhaps unfairly, please correct me) that you blame.

Re: Why Go is my favorite programming language

#190

Post by KirinDave »

Xeoncross wrote: post #131
KirinDave wrote: post #120

> There is a cost to introducing an abstraction layer. Go code is usually rather clear, at the cost of being a bit repetitive at times. Go programmers say this a lot and every time I see it I wince. We've had all sorts of flights of fashion and fancy in the programming world, but one observation has emerged that seems closer to fact every time we test it: more code is more bugs. The more code you write, the more chan…

I love the error handling in Go. Every other language I've used led to the inevitable and useless "An error was encountered" message. Go is the first language where I can actually access the original socket permission error because it was actually passed up.

Well I won't deny you this experience, but I do think maybe you've been lucky in which parts of the stdlib you've worked in.

Because I felt nothing but frustration at most libs I worked with. I (as others before me) ended up grepping error strings.

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