3 weeks writing code in Go • Hacker News Board

Re: 3 weeks writing code in Go

#11

Post by sfifs » Sun, Feb 02, 2020, 6:11 AM UTC

weff_ wrote: post #10

bsaul wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree and in fact i think this sentence is a self-contradiction in some way : If you want a "big longstanding" project, then doing "complex" thing is probably the thing you want to avoid at all cost. And as a proof that it's possible, one can have a look at the standard library, which is big, longstanding and is the most readable std lib i've ever seen.

So when is it appropriate to do complex things?

HPC where you try to wring the last ounce of performance from machines insufficiently powerful for the task. Weather forecasting, weapons simulation, protein folding...

Re: 3 weeks writing code in Go

#12

Post by lazyant » Sun, Feb 02, 2020, 4:24 PM UTC

PhilippGille wrote: post #2

He lists many things he likes and very few he dislikes, but the last sentence is: > For big and longstanding projects, I do believe Go is bad because if you want to do something complex, Go won’t let you do this anyhow. Without a proper explanation how he got to this strong conclusion. And especially with so many cloud infrastructure projects being written in Go (Docker, Kubernetes, Terraform, Consul, etcd, Cockroach…

Yes the comment is "funny" since from what I understand, Google wanted a relatively simple language that a lot of people could use in large projects.

Re: 3 weeks writing code in Go

#13

Post by weff_ » Sun, Feb 02, 2020, 7:43 PM UTC

sfifs wrote: post #11

weff_ wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So when is it appropriate to do complex things?

HPC where you try to wring the last ounce of performance from machines insufficiently powerful for the task. Weather forecasting, weapons simulation, protein folding...

That's interesting. I don't think as optimized memory manipulation via convoluted casting and such as "complex stuff". I think of that as optimization.

I thought what the author meant by complex was a gigantic system that needs to use many design patterns for good reasons; the code models a very complex, convoluted domain.

Re: 3 weeks writing code in Go

#14

Post by bsaul » Sun, Feb 02, 2020, 10:22 PM UTC

weff_ wrote: post #10

bsaul wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree and in fact i think this sentence is a self-contradiction in some way : If you want a "big longstanding" project, then doing "complex" thing is probably the thing you want to avoid at all cost. And as a proof that it's possible, one can have a look at the standard library, which is big, longstanding and is the most readable std lib i've ever seen.

So when is it appropriate to do complex things?

When you prototype. But once it reaches production, you should hopefuly have managed to reduce the complexity to its bare minimum