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.
check out most of hashicorp's product line:
Rob Pike interview
211–220 of 273 posts
Re: Rob Pike interview
#212Earlier quoted context omitted.
> #1 If your goal is to make the most efficient and fast code (garbage collected or not), it is not clear gc-less languages are always better. Sometimes, not free-ing the memory at the first possible time will actually be good for you overall. Which is why languages like C++ let you write and use your own allocators. There are lots of reasons to do this (eg word alignment). And while I agree that it's certainly possi…
> Which is why languages like C++ let you write and use your own allocators. There are lots of reasons to do this (eg word alignment). You're aware that the Go allocator is written in Go, right?
Is there a way to write and use your own allocator, or is it off limits to everyone outside the language design team?
Re: Rob Pike interview
#213Earlier quoted context omitted.
For Dropbox and Uber, it is.
I thought Uber was node.js company (to the point that they had to rewrite existing solid projects, because they weren't in node.js) As for Dropbox I was convinced primary language was Python.
DropBox: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11284051
Their switch from Python to Go was pretty well documented on their engineering blog, but I can't find it, other than comments on HN like the one above.
Re: Rob Pike interview
#214Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Go is a great language for software engineering Is it though? While tests in go are not terrible, to be a truly effective software engineer (vs just a programmer or dev) you want a very good test and documentation story, and there are languages out there with far, far, better tests and documentation primitives than Go.
Can you name a few? Genuine question. I've only really written a lot of tests in Python and Go, and I really dislike the python tests I've had to write. I don't think it's so much the language itself, but that python is so flexible with the mocking you can do that it enables code that is really tedious to test. With Go you have much more limited ability to mock things, so there are added constraints for code to be te…
Testing wise, elixir is fantastic. I have a relatively large codebase where I run what are effectively full on simulations of the system in sharded-by-test partitions of state to verify correctness and robustness of the code. There are about 60 of those that run concurrently with the unit tests and the whole thing closes in 10 seconds.
Docs for elixir are pretty, too: here's a library that I wrote. The doc system is extensible enough that I could patch in docstrings from another language and also hyperlink (the buttons link to github) the GitHub code across languages (the `zig structs` section in the sidebar is autogenerated by parsing zig code) https://hexdocs.pm/zigler/Zigler.html
My joke is that you want to write documentation that's pretty and html-responsive enough that you can read it on the can between coding sprints.
Re: Rob Pike interview
#215Earlier quoted context omitted.
> it was (and is, IMHO) a better Python And in my opinion, it is a better Java. It succeeds in the niche where Java is used today: big softwares, shared by numbers of teams, working on different timezones and in different languages, and with varying degrees of skill. Go is so stubborn it takes the fun out of programming and ironically that's a good thing: when code can't be tied to anything personal, it is much more…
Better Java 1.0, yes. Better Java 14, definitely not.
Better as a tool, not as a language. By being uninteresting it removes focus on itself so we can better focus on what also matters: designing, measuring, documenting, fixing what is not code nor software
Re: Rob Pike interview
#216Earlier quoted context omitted.
In general good "experienced professional programmers" don't have one "tool of choice" but their tool of choice varies by what they're doing. I would choose Go for a lot of things, but not for everything.
Whilst I generally agree with this it's definitely the case that experience leads you to prefer certain tools over others even when they may both be usable for a specific task. i.e Go is relatively well suited for a simplistic web service. But even if I don't expect to need to extend it I would still prefer to write it in something that is more extension friendly than Go. Therein lies the problem. Go actually isn't b…
I like the lack of enterprise layers that Java espouses, the simply deploys of a single binary, built in support for JSON and a perform at HTTP server. A code base that is accessible from the high level all the day to the fundamentals of the standard library. If I can’t find documentation, I can read Go code and grok it instantly. There is one style - gofmt style. Honestly, I rarely need genetics and I prefer the simplicity over over-engineered templates classes in Java and C++. If I need to do concurrency, it’s super simple and easier to get performant than Java or C++. Working with junior developers? They can learn Go in a week. Good luck with C++ and to a degree Java with the norm of relying on layers of Beans and XML frameworks.
Re: Rob Pike interview
#217Go 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…
Don't beat yourself up for that. I tried Go sometime back (year or so may be) and found it an awkward language. It probably has its own design philisophy may be that I missed.
Things like lack of generics and type system makes you repeat things quite a lot (e. g. It was pretty impossible to write a true ORM or a DI system in go). I found the interface system quite awkward in that types implicitly implement an interface if they have the same method signature was weird to me. I think method overloading wasn't supported either, if I remember correctly.
I think people who loved Go initially probably came from C. It feels a lot like C with better standard library, memory safety and fast compile times. I like Go for the same reasons actually. But until there's at least some way to write generic code, it's an awkward language to anyone coming from more expressive languages. I program in C# mostly which is an extremely expressive language with classes, interfaces, generics, expression trees, linq, delegates (akin to function pointers). Go is far behind other languages for application development, my two cents. But for systems programmers used to C which is a very small language, Go must be like a transition to paradise :)
Re: Rob Pike interview
#218Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am going to disagree pretty heavily with this. You don't give any explanations, evidence, or mention your experience, so let me lead with mine before I explain where I think you are wrong. I cut my teeth in the 90s with C, and have professionally used PHP, Python, Java, C#, Javascript (both server and client side), and have been using Go as my main choice for the past 4 years. I've worked on teams as small as 1 up…
Great to see an answer that provides context and reason for a language preference. By way of reflection on your answers: 1) This is hit and miss for me. I have to read Go code frequently: not every day or even week, and sometimes under incident pressure. It's less verbose than Java/C#/JavaScript, more verbose than Python/Ruby/Scala. But it's sufficiently verbose to require, for me, cognitive discipline to not skim (i…
Javascript is plenty concise and expressive. Can you give an example where Go is less verbose compared to javascript?
Edit: C# is actually quite expressive too, I have a hard time believing Go is less verbose than C#.
Re: Rob Pike interview
#219Earlier quoted context omitted.
Great to see an answer that provides context and reason for a language preference. By way of reflection on your answers: 1) This is hit and miss for me. I have to read Go code frequently: not every day or even week, and sometimes under incident pressure. It's less verbose than Java/C#/JavaScript, more verbose than Python/Ruby/Scala. But it's sufficiently verbose to require, for me, cognitive discipline to not skim (i…
Javascript is plenty concise and expressive. Can you give an example where Go is less verbose compared to javascript? Edit: C# is actually quite expressive too, I have a hard time believing Go is less verbose than C#.
Most people that think C# is verbose haven't used modern C#. It's an excellent language and if I had to go back to MS world I wouldn't bad sad at all.
That said right now I get little opportunity to use it because it doesn't fit into the current ecosystems I am working in. Shame because it really is a joy to program in, tooling is excellent async programming in C# -just works- which isn't the case in Rust, Java (or Kotlin) or anything comparable.
So while I don't get to use it often I hold C# in high regard.
Re: Rob Pike interview
#220Go 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 consider myself able to write production quality code.
When I started with Go I thought it was awesome. As my projects grew I found them to become less maintainable than my previous Java projects, and still less maintainable than my newer Rust projects.