Go: Ten years and climbing

My introduction to Go was pretty recent about 2 years ago and we went all in. We had an internal tool that started out as a test MVP written in python. Demand was growing fast so a year later it was an absolute mess of tech debt. We knew a significant refactoring was needed and figured the best thing to do was to just redesign and build from scratch. One of the guys had played with Go in his spare time so convinced all of us to just try it. Best decision ever, at least for this use case where we needed speed and stablilty. Go's native concurrency features were an absolute joy. It's really opinionated too so it ended up very convenient to use as a team with different coding styles. Thank you Go team!

I've been writing Go professionally, full-time, for the past five years.

I'm a polyglot, so before Go, I loved exploring every new language I could get my hands on[0]. I still do, for fun, but Go is the one language that has kept me hooked all this time. It's not for any single feature, or for the community (though that's a great part of it). It's because it's the only language which I feel gets out of the way for me and lets me write powerful, robust, and maintainable software quickly without having to think or struggle against the tools.

For me, Go is like trying to do surgery wearing latex surgical gloves, instead of wearing thick woolen mittens.

[0] Seriously: if you can name it, and there's a working Linux x86_64 compiler/interpreter for it, I've probably tried it.

It's been a while since I used it, but Revel[0] is almost within the same family as Rails. The developers of Revel say they're inspired by the Play Framework.

Another option that looks nice is the Buffalo[1]. It's a collection of libraries that are built to play nice with each other, but you don't have to use all of them as a bundle. You can use only the layers you want.

[0] https://revel.github.io/

[1] https://gobuffalo.io/docs/getting-started

I think that's a great comparison. Some people love Perl and some hate it, but there's no denying it was a tremendously important language in the 90s. The duct tape of the Internet.

(I don't happen to like either Perl or Go myself! But I think I can see why others do.)

Having dealt with enough spaghetti code over the years (just a few of industry experience, and some more years of academia), I understand what Go's strengths are. It's an opinionated language that stops users from being too clever or writing code that's too complex.

That said, I've always hated the trends that have brought Golang into popularity. The engineers I've felt who could benefit from Golang the most could also benefit by getting a better handle on their fundamentals and taking a moment to design their codebase more. As a simple language to wire pieces together, Golang is fine, but it really doesn't give you the tools (imo) to be productive for anything more complex than simple apps. It's a great alternative to JS (again imo), but not something I'd like to write.

We shouldn't need to treat the developer like a toddler to get them to write safe code. I'm a much bigger proponent of languages such as Rust or Haskell which give the developer the _tools_ to ensure their own data integrity, but I guess that says something about me as a developer and why I don't like Golang.