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Rob Pike interview

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Re: Rob Pike interview

#131

Post by cletus »

nostrademons wrote: post #117
dehrmann wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It attracted Python refugees Honest question: other than parallelism and performance, what are the main reasons someone would switch from Python to Go?

Single deployment binary, static typing, gofmt, and takes "there should be one and only one obvious way to do it" even farther than Python. It's very easy for new team members to ramp up on a Go codebase - formatting is standardized, libraries are standardized, and the language encourages very simple readable constructs (at the expense of brevity and abstraction, sometimes). That makes it attractive for companies in…

100% this.

My personal view is that dynamically typed languages are largely falling out of favour with Javascript being the one glaring exception (and even there if I were starting a project today I'd use Typescript).

On the single deployment binary issue, let me just underline that point with one word: virtualenv.

Re: Rob Pike interview

#132

Post by leetrout »

adtac wrote: post #102

half the comments don't make any sense anymore because of the title change

Yes. It was a drastic title change- I wish mods (dang?) would note the change when it happens.

For others the original title was the title of the page:

Rob Pike interview: “Go has indeed become the language of cloud infrastructure“

Re: Rob Pike interview

#133

Post by christiansakai »

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…

I do JS/TS profesionally, I play around with various languages on the side including Haskell/Rust.

The more I work in JS the more I realized that I'm dumb. I'm not worthy to hold the power that JS has, much more other more complicated languages.

I tried Go. I like it. It makes me feel safe and smart enough to write production grade app.

Small docs, small language, no need fancy IDE, just any regular text editor like Vim works. Easy to read, easy to reason about. Everything is easy.

Now I finally can focus on other non-programming passion instead of chasing endless language features in other programming languages.

I like Go. The language for mediocre SWE like me. I code, I go home, I enjoy life.

Re: Rob Pike interview

#134

Post by eropple »

throwaway894345 wrote: post #126
centimeter wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I shouldn't need an industrial-strength editing engine to efficiently express my ideas. (And don't, if I'm using a nice expressive language.)

Generally speaking, Go is one of the easiest languages to write with a simple text editor. Rust is among the hardest due to its complexity and demanding static analysis. This isn't a bad thing, and tools like rust-analyzer make writing Rust a lot easier. But rust-analyzer is amazing technology from the future; hardly an ordinary text editor plugin.

> Generally speaking, Go is one of the easiest languages to write with a simple text editor.

And one of the absolute dog's-breakfast worst to refactor regardless of editing environment. No statically typed language should be this hard to do basic changes in, and yet it exists.

Being writable in a "simple text editor" isn't a plus when the "simple text editors" in 2020 are IDEs with the name filed off.

Re: Rob Pike interview

#135

Post by cletus »

jrockway wrote: post #113
cletus wrote: post #26

I have huge respect for Rob Pike but there's a bit of revisionist history going on here. Go was originally envisioned as a systems programming language. It was often called "a better C". This exposed Rob Pike's lack of experience in the area (IMHO) because anyone who had done any systems programming at all knew that garbage collection made any systems language a nonstarter. Where Go succeeded was completely unintenti…

> The small one is the lack of IDE support. You don't need to write an IDE. You just need to have sufficient integration into Jetbrains IDEs (at a minimum). Jetbrains wrote their own Go IDE, goland. The rest of us use an LSP client that talks to gopls. I have used that for about a year and it does everything that I would want an IDE to do; accurate context-sensitive completion, an easy way to peek at signatures and d…

Hey, Rockway, how are you?

Yeah, I should clarify: I was responding to Rob's point in the interview where he was talking about tooling and IDE integration from the outset rather than the current state of the world.

As for Jetbrains writing their own IDE... well, yes and no. Sure there's a separate product from a user perspective but IntelliJ has had a Go plugin for several years. You'll probably find Goland (just like all the other little-IntelliJs like AppCode, PyCharm and RubyMine) are little more than stripped down versions of IntelliJ's code base with a different default set of plugins. My point is that Goland wasn't a "new IDE from scratch" level of investment by Jetbrains and that a third-party plugin could've been largely equivalent.

Re: Rob Pike interview

#136

Post by dvirsky »

jpgvm wrote: post #25
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 isn't true at all. Go is not the tool of choice for experienced professional programmers for exactly this reason. The ability to quickly refactor code is very important and Go fails at it horribly for a number of reasons. 1) sheer verbosity. 2) multiple return makes altering function signatures tedious. 3) no generics mean code is written in hard to refactor styles out of the box 4) poor reflection support 5) po…

> Go is not the tool of choice for experienced professional programmers

[citation needed]

Re: Rob Pike interview

#137

Post by nemothekid »

rootsudo wrote: post #20

Really? Outside Google, I'm not aware of major orgs that use GO. I see the same .net C# stack, python, Ruby...... Java and PHP.

Cloudflare, Cloudstrike, Uber and Dropbox are 4 public companies that I know use Go pretty heavily. And there plenty more startups using Go. In VC-backed startup land, I'm pretty sure Go has higher penetration than C# or PHP.

Re: Rob Pike interview

#138

Post by throwaway894345 »

bfrog wrote: post #42
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…

Liking Go has nothing to do with being a quality software engineer. Go itself is probably the least software engineering friendly language out there. The goal of a computer language is to express your thoughts and instructions into something a machine can understand. Full stop. Go is absolutely terrible at letting you the human express what you want the machine to do. It has compile time type checks, but then fails t…

> Go itself is probably the least software engineering friendly language out there

My experience with software engineering went from "the language (type system, grammar, syntax, etc) is super important!" to "the language is one of the least important considerations in choosing a language". The more important features are tooling and ecosystem.

I don't want to have to learn a new configuration language or imperative DSL just to add project dependencies or setup tests. I don't want to have to learn yet another documentation framework for generating documentation from code comments. I don't want to have to spend lots of time setting up CI/CD pipelines to build my source code and documentation packages and publish them to their respective repositories. I don't want to have to worry about whether my users or fellow developers have the right versions of dependencies or the runtime installed on their system. I don't want to have to make unmaintainable Dockerfiles because it's the only way to have performant builds in the happy path. I want to minimize time wasted during code review on comments about style or programming paradigms. Similarly I don't want to waste time waiting for code to compile.

If the language is type safe in 95% of cases, that's good enough--people still make lots of money writing lots of 100% untyped JS and Python and Clojure and so on--the extra 5% would be nice to have but I'm not going to trade tooling, ecosystem, and developer velocity for it.

Basically, as I become more experienced, I begin to understand the difference between programming and software engineering (my heart is in programming, but software engineering pays the bills). Go is a great language for software engineering, but most of its criticism seems to be directed at programming concerns.

Re: Rob Pike interview

#139

Post by nemothekid »

lostmsu wrote: post #66
kjksf wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How hard are you looking? Facebook, Dropbox, Uber, Apple and literally thousands of other companies, big and small, use Go.

Use - maybe. Is it the most used lang in these companies? Probably not.

For Dropbox and Uber, it is.

Re: Rob Pike interview

#140

Post by cletus »

nostrademons wrote: post #99
cletus wrote: post #26

I have huge respect for Rob Pike but there's a bit of revisionist history going on here. Go was originally envisioned as a systems programming language. It was often called "a better C". This exposed Rob Pike's lack of experience in the area (IMHO) because anyone who had done any systems programming at all knew that garbage collection made any systems language a nonstarter. Where Go succeeded was completely unintenti…

Go was always intended for writing the type of networked application servers that are common in Google's infrastructure. [I was at Google when it was released - I thought you were too?] It's succeeded at basically the same niche that it was intended for. The difference, as another commenter points out, is Rob Pike's ignorance of how the world outside of Bell Labs & Google had changed. In the 80s you would've built ne…

> Go was always intended for writing the type of networked application servers that are common in Google's infrastructure. [I was at Google when it was released - I thought you were too?]

I was (2010-2017 to be exact) so I remember how this was communicated but internally and externally. This HN submission [1] to HN from 2011 reflects my recollection of that messaging that Go was a better C.

Even better, Rob in his own words [2]:

> I was asked a few weeks ago, "What was the biggest surprise you encountered rolling out Go?" I knew the answer instantly: Although we expected C++ programmers to see Go as an alternative, instead most Go programmers come from languages like Python and Ruby. Very few come from C++.

> Go is still inferior to Python in prototyping, in web development, and in data-science

On the data science point, I certainly agree that nothing looks likely to displace numpy/scipy anytime soon. Python's much-maligned GIL does simplify C module extensions and, I believe, was a key contributor in Facebook choosing to move to Mercurial many years ago (long before my time).

I wrote a fairly significant internal app at Google in Python and essentially swore I'd never do it again. The way I like to put it is that I don't want to write unit tests for spelling mistakes. I haven't used Go for Web development but I'd already choose it over Python just for static typing.

As an aside, I found the protobuf integration in Python to be basically terrible. Perhaps it's improved in the last 7+ years though.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2535206

[2]: https://commandcenter.blogspot.com/2012/06/less-is-exponenti...

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