It's not a good start when you have to resort to gifs ridiculing the other article.
(the article has been tweaked a bit after being featured on HN, just in case my comment now seems out of place)
Re: Moving from PHP to Go and Back Again
131–140 of 281 posts
Re: Re: Moving from PHP to Go and Back Again
#132PHP is unique in several ways: it's especially designed for the web, is a Web framework itself, comes with everything inbuilt, has C/Java syntax, has a shared nothing architecture, replaced VB as the most popular language for beginners, is used by most websites, is easy to use just drop a php file to Apache www dir. You simply can't objectively compare PHP to other languages because it's different to all others, it's…
But a pokemon character was rather unkind to it back in 2012, so here you are.
Two years after that, Mickens wrote a glorious takedown[0] of Javascript--which must not have been as glorious as I thought--since people still seem hell-bent on using in as many places as possible.
Alan Kay said that computing is now a pop culture...
[0] https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/mickens/files/towashitalla...
Re: Re: Moving from PHP to Go and Back Again
#133Everyone I know who uses Go complains about it. Every day you write Go code you will come across some piece of code that would be shorter with templates in C++ or using , or you could do it more simply in Python, or if you were really clever it would be a single line of Haskell. And yet we keep writing Go. By comparison, I'm a bit put off by the Rust community's evangelism, but that might just be my personal experien…
> And yet we keep writing Go. What are the alternatives if you want something with type checking? Java? No, thanks. Haskel? Where are the libraries? C/C++? I guess Typescript is the only alternative
What is your problem with Java?
What does "No thanks" mean?
It's interesting to hear your perspective, but hard to know what you mean if you don't write it.
(Also have you even looked at Scala, Kotlin, Groovy with static typing, and perhaps others?)
Re: Re: Moving from PHP to Go and Back Again
#134Earlier quoted context omitted.
Which other languages? Turbo Pascal compilation speed, in MS-DOS, using 90’s hardware was already faster than Go. There are lots of languages with modules support, with static linking and native compilation to choose from.
:D You're comparing turbo pascal with Go today? You're gonna write microservices and web applications with Turbo Pascal?
Ever heard of FreePascal and Delphi?
In any case it doesn't change the fact that Go's compilation speed is nothing to brag about, it has been done before in many other languages, Turbo Pascal was just one example.
If you wish I can provide other examples of languages that compile as fast, on such old hardware while matching Go's compilation speed, with richer language features.
Re: Re: Moving from PHP to Go and Back Again
#135Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think JSP is a great contender, and I see your point about overengineering. PHP with type-checking is alright, but if I'm going to use a scripting language I'd prefer Python or Ruby.
Both ruby and python seem to encourage duck-typing. I worked with both of them in the past and that's the main reason why I always came back to PHP. I need my type declarations...
Agreed. The way i see it for the web is PHP is just a better Ruby/Python in terms of libraries, package management, deployment, language features, performance, with the only drawback being a quirky standard library.
Re: Re: Moving from PHP to Go and Back Again
#136I have been writing Go, Node.js and PHP for quite a while now. I don't think golang is overhyped; nor it's a silver bullet. There are systems like Kubernetes, etcd, and so on that are implemented in Golang and they work really well. I think problem is people trying to use Golang for EVERYTHING ! There are so many things I would disagree with in the article; but I won't disagree with the fact that if you want language…
If you look for an oop or fp language you are also out of luck. You are only happy if you look for a better C which most people aren't.
> You are only happy if you look for a better C which most people aren't.
I'd argue Rust is the "better" C. Go is a "simpler" C, at the expense of expressiveness, features, speed (only noticable in very low level usecases) and applicability for certain domains (Go is primarily for networked apps).
In the same way Java wanted to be a simpler C++ (which came with it's own drawbacks).
And for me Go is more of a competitor to Java (as Java is mostly used for networked applications) than it is to C.
Re: Re: Moving from PHP to Go and Back Again
#137I see no facts or genuine refutation in this article, just opinions. Therefore I can only assume that truth hurts because the article you are trying to argue with has a bunch of valid points. If you look at the history of Go you have to realize that it was created for the reason which is in the original article: to be a better C. If you come from C it is good, sure. And you can write big projects in it like in C (jus…
Okay, let's say I agree with your arguments: 1. Go "is still not as fast as Java can be" [1] 2. "Go lacks the most basic tools which any seasoned developer can expect from a language (like generics)" 3. "Go does not have a de facto build system and you can’t handle dependency management in an easy way" [2] 4. odd error handling 5. not a lot of libraries to choose from [3] 6. possibly more arguments that I missed when…
It's not really stupid, it can be misinformed, or just a matter of taste. For some people having a small couple of specific qualities of a language is more important (because they "like" them) is more important than even some objective overall quality/ease of use.
Many people are just forced to used it because the company uses it.
And of course, all the people who actually ARE looking for a "Better C" - then they will of course use something like Go. It would be very "stupid" to use Java in that case.
Re: Re: Moving from PHP to Go and Back Again
#138Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is not always true. Static linking with other language doesn't always have similar experience with Go. One of these is the compilation speed. With other languages you'll still have time to get a coffee break before its done.:)
Which other languages? Turbo Pascal compilation speed, in MS-DOS, using 90’s hardware was already faster than Go. There are lots of languages with modules support, with static linking and native compilation to choose from.
>Turbo Pascal compilation speed, in MS-DOS, using 90’s hardware was already faster than Go.
What relevance does this have on the compiler landscape today ?
If you have to use a compiler from ~30 years ago to find a comparison supporting your claim, it sounds very much like Go is indeed much faster than what it competes against today.
Re: Re: Moving from PHP to Go and Back Again
#139Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've always been really skeptical of those language performance comparisons which refer to PHP. As stated above PHP7 has similar performance when compared to HHVM which was made by Facebook. Additionally PHP has an amazing performance debugger by FB called xhprof. PHP performance could always be increased hugely by making sure is cache buckets have enough memory (opcode cache, realpath_cache_size). Secondly with any…
> Secondly with any web framework your app will most likely be limited by IO (database, file lookups, networking) before it becomes limited by actual code execution performance. Latency is additive; it's a sum() operation, not a max() operation. Yes, a large fraction of most web requests get eaten by blocking on IO, but everything on top of that adds up, and small numbers add up surprisingly quickly. And the more you…
> Latency is additive; it's a sum() operation, not a max() operation.
This! And you can only discard some components latency when it disappears in the deviation of another components much larger latency. In most PHP (or Ruby/Python/etc for that matter), this is not the case. They add some 10-150ms on top, and often the db calls are Performance does matter, and is hard to improve once you have many KLOC of code in a slow language. Hence FB spend big bucks on PHP performance improvements.
Re: Re: Moving from PHP to Go and Back Again
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
Aren’t JVM language equally simple? Just a fat JAR.
You're forgetting Java.
But nowadays it's pretty much installed everywhere? If not installed yet - it's a really easy and quite unobtrusive to install, one-liners in many OSes.
So in the strict practical sense, is that such a big difference? What, extra 300MB for storing JVM? Who cares with 2TB commodity harddrives? (unless you're embedded, but then you wouldn't use Java or Go usually).