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Rob Pike interview

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Re: Rob Pike interview

#11

Post by gorgoiler »

Go is the language that made me realize I’m not much of a production quality software engineer.

Normally I would be quite happy riffing with ideas in Ruby or Python, and just running my code and iterating trying to figure out what to do.

When I tried this in Go, every time I wanted to change the shape of my code to try doing things slightly differently I had to do a lot of work to get the code to compile again.

I feel like a professional coder wouldn’t hit that road block because they’d have a better idea what they were doing in the first place.

I have scurried back to Ruby with my amateur tail between my legs, but I hope to try Go again some day and find a style that’s a bit more forgiving of my not-Staff-SWE skills.

Re: Rob Pike interview

#12

Post by jpgvm »

DevopsQuestions wrote: post #7

What are the chances of Rust or another language coming to the fore for cloud infra?

Reasonably high. There is a good deal of frustration with Go from experienced programmers that worked with it for several years and grew tired of the tedium involved.

Rust has some obstacles to overcome to supplant Go on a wider scale though. Namely compile time and learning curve - especially in relation to concurrency and async which are key features to replacing Go as it's main draw is it's green runtime.

Re: Rob Pike interview

#14

Post by q3k »

DevopsQuestions wrote: post #7

What are the chances of Rust or another language coming to the fore for cloud infra?

Not great as is.

Rust does not have a comprehensive story for CSP concurrency like Go has. It does have a fair share of libraries/ecosystems (like Tokio), but not having something built in means that you have to hunt for the right set of libraries to work together. Meanwhile, in Go, every single library will just work with its concurrency model out of the box.

Re: Rob Pike interview

#16

Post by bluntfang »

gorgoiler wrote: post #11

Go is the language that made me realize I’m not much of a production quality software engineer. Normally I would be quite happy riffing with ideas in Ruby or Python, and just running my code and iterating trying to figure out what to do. When I tried this in Go, every time I wanted to change the shape of my code to try doing things slightly differently I had to do a lot of work to get the code to compile again. I fee…

this is a toxic mindset. just because the tooling is poor doesn't make you an amateur. if you're getting paid, you're doing great. keep it up and use the tools that work to get the job done.

Re: Rob Pike interview

#17

Post by cfors »

DevopsQuestions wrote: post #7

What are the chances of Rust or another language coming to the fore for cloud infra?

For platform stuff that has speed and correctness as the highest priority? Absolutely. Things like http proxies, message queues, shared infrastructure makes sense to be done in Rust.

For writing a normal networked http/rpc/event stream service Go is probably more than good enough. It’s not a winner-take-all market.

A great example imo is Buoyant’s Linkerd. Rust dataplane proxy as well as a control plane written in Go. Two different requirements for each of those services drove the language requirements

Re: Rob Pike interview

#18

Post by nostrademons »

gorgoiler wrote: post #11

Go is the language that made me realize I’m not much of a production quality software engineer. Normally I would be quite happy riffing with ideas in Ruby or Python, and just running my code and iterating trying to figure out what to do. When I tried this in Go, every time I wanted to change the shape of my code to try doing things slightly differently I had to do a lot of work to get the code to compile again. I fee…

There's a software lifecycle. At the beginning of a software project, nobody knows anything about what to do, because (if the market niche isn't already filled) nobody has done it before. Python and Ruby are great for that. Then as the software grows up, the requirements become more well-known, and more people start using it, you need to transition to more maintainable code that runs more quickly. Go is ideal for companies in that growth stage - it runs fast, it's easy to communicate what the code does, it doesn't allow a lot of tricks that can trip up other developers, and it encourages relatively robust code. Once you get to the massive scale stage like Google you probably need to be in C++ anyway, but by definition growth companies are where a lot of the action is.

Re: Rob Pike interview

#19

Post by kerng »

gorgoiler wrote: post #11

Go is the language that made me realize I’m not much of a production quality software engineer. Normally I would be quite happy riffing with ideas in Ruby or Python, and just running my code and iterating trying to figure out what to do. When I tried this in Go, every time I wanted to change the shape of my code to try doing things slightly differently I had to do a lot of work to get the code to compile again. I fee…

Agreed, for creative coding endeavours other languages are better suited, especially when doing rapid prototyping and refacturing. Sometimes even simple bash scripting allows for quicker results.
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