I've picked it up from time to time when I've had to, either for a small web service or cli tool. It feels kind of like a blunt instrument rather than a fine tool but thats also totally OK. It seems to have found it's place in various parts of infrastructure tooling and developer tooling.
Ask HN: Go programming language is over ten years old. What do you think of it?
51–60 of 310 posts
Re: Ask HN: Go programming language is over ten years old. What do you think of it?
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
Go more than makes up for this in the deployment aspect, since deploying Python in 2020 (Python 2, Python 3, conda, pip, venv, system interpreter, poetry, etc.) is still a mess.
Only a mess if you use python 2, conda, etc... What’s difficult about this? /bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/in... )" curl -sSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/python-poetry/poetry/maste... | python - brew install pyenv // update shell with pyenv pointer pyenv install 3.9.0 pyenv global 3.9.0 poetry init poetry config virtualenvs.in-project true --local poetry ins…
pip is broken in no many aspects, between pip and pip3, things installed in your home folder vs /var, "binary" entries that don't exist after installing a tool, cryptics stack traces because of missing libs / not compatible for your platform ( native build ) ect ...
Why do we need virtual env in 2020?
It's one of the worse "modern" language to build, even Java / NodeJS are better.
Re: Ask HN: Go programming language is over ten years old. What do you think of it?
#53[deleted]
Re: Ask HN: Go programming language is over ten years old. What do you think of it?
#54It was a large mistake to ignore the lessons of Java and now the language is full of quirks as well, including the upcoming generics design.
Regardless of the whole systems programming language polemic from the anti-GC crowd, several projects deployed into production like gVisor and TamaGo prove otherwise.
Finally thanks to killer applications like Docker, Kubernetes and everything around them, Go has become unavoidable for many developers, regardless of our opinion towards the language.
Re: Ask HN: Go programming language is over ten years old. What do you think of it?
#55Go is a welcomed simplicity to the stack in a world where everyone is over complicating software engineering by jumping to Kubernetes and micro-services. Simplicity really is where Go stands out against languages like Java. Yes, you may write more boilerplate and break DRY, but your code will be readable and won’t contain any hidden magic.
We spend most of our work day reading and trying to understanding code. What you see is what you get with Go!
Side note: Go also runs fabulously on Kubernetes and is great for building micro-services :)
Re: Ask HN: Go programming language is over ten years old. What do you think of it?
#56They tried to make a better C++ and accidentally made a better Java and a better Python.
Agree over the java part. But Python is still orders of magnitude more productive, being it because of the ecosystem, available libraries, frameworks, or almost any other metric. The only advantage over python is performance, and maybe static typing depending on your taste.
> Agree over the java part. But Python is still orders of magnitude more productive, being it because of the ecosystem, available libraries, frameworks, or almost any other metric.
How many years of Java experience do have?
Re: Ask HN: Go programming language is over ten years old. What do you think of it?
#57Speaking strictly about the language, and not the platform, I'm skeptical about the lack of more modern core library and language features like immutability, pattern matching, and records. They spent almost 10 years saying "we don't need generics", but now are implementing it Also, the dependency management.
> They spent almost 10 years saying "we don't need generics", but now are implementing it
You're making things up. Not a single member of the Go team ever said "we don't need generics". In fact, the FAQ stated from day one that they "continue to think about it", and that "Generics may well be added at some point".
Re: Ask HN: Go programming language is over ten years old. What do you think of it?
#58Go taught me how we tend to rely on overly complex structures to solve our daily problems, which makes our code look smart, but in fact is harder to maintain and understand by newcomers.
99% of the time, trying to use idiomatic go instead of fighting the type system lets you have more maintainable and easier to understand code.
Now, every time i'm back to using another PL, i tend to rely on advanced type systems feature much less frequently, and only after making sure i'm not making the problem more complicated than it is.
Re: Ask HN: Go programming language is over ten years old. What do you think of it?
#59Non-exported struct fields are a way of preventing your library from being composable. Checking if a value implements an interface is a way of writing surprising bugs. The standard library uses both of these features extensively, to give users bugs and prevent itself from being composable. Checking that the user uses all values bound to variables but letting them discard errors by not binding them to a variable is a…
Can you elaborate on private struct fields? The same criticism would apply for any OO language with access control / visibility of fields right?
I guess is the typical critic of people used to monkey patch libraries in dynamic languages.
Re: Ask HN: Go programming language is over ten years old. What do you think of it?
#60I find myself reaching for it over other languages when I want to build small servers with a bit of in-memory state or a bit of heavy processing. For little search-engines, Go is perfect. While writing servers in Flask + Python is much more convenient, I still prefer Go because I don't run into the limits that Python has. The development process is fluid enough that I wish the language was suited to more usecases. Wh…
What is it that you find more convenient about Python/Flask?