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Learn Go in five minutes

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Re: Learn Go in five minutes

#81

Post by simias »

Jnr wrote: post #72
simias wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To me Rust is more like "C++ done right". It's massively bigger, more complicated and slower to compile than C. The C ABI is also the de-facto lingua franca for language interop, something that's not easily achievable with Rust or C++ (or Go, for that matter).

Have you tried Rust? The ABI in Rust is doable: https://people.gnome.org/~federico/blog/rust-stable-abi.html And it doesn't feel like C++ when writing it. The syntax and language features are nice and feel modern. It does require more attention because of what it compiles down to, but the compiler is there to help with it. I haven't been excited about any programming languages in years, but Rust has certainly taken m…

I love Rust so dearly that I wish I could marry it, but I still feel that it's a massively more complicated language than C.

Re: Learn Go in five minutes

#82

Post by simias »

autarch wrote: post #45
simias wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My main small day-to-day usability gripes with C are lack of type inference, lack of destructors and terrible ergonomics for error handling. Go solves two out of three, but it really dropped the ball hard on error handling which is very disappointing IMO. Things like generics and garbage collection involve some deep tradeoffs, so I get Go's take on them, even if I don't necessarily agree with it. On the other hand IM…

I agree that the error handling is terrible, but I'm not sure how much better it could be without generics. For me, the gold standard in error handling is Rust, where the type system simply does not allow you to ignore errors. This means that the existence of error handling is checked at compile time. Of course, this doesn't mean your error handling is _good_, but I think that's beyond any language design to enforce.…

Go uses compiler magic to have effectively generic collections, why not hardcode a Result type in the same fashion? It's not very elegant, but it's pragmatic and error handling is important enough that it may well warrant it.

Re: Learn Go in five minutes

#83

Post by BoorishBears »

Thaxll wrote: post #38
BoorishBears wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. Go feels like it's aimed at creating applications that run at a level above where C traditionally runs while keeping the pared down feature set of C, and it just doesn't work well imo. I loved playing with Go, but eventually it feels like you're conditioning yourself to be ok with a lot of "bad" code. Tons of repetition, tons of boilerplate by other names. It's like the simplicity gets in the way of itself.…

The last couple of years are showing that Go delivers, it's pretty easy to find dozen of "real" software written in Go that are weidly used.

Sometimes I don't know why I bother talking about Go.

It's proponents are so quick to go defensive that no one is capable of reading any complaint in an even mildly charitable light.

I mean I shouldn't literally have to say "I'm not saying you can't use Go for real work before someone flies at me." When talking about a language as widely used as Go right? Like that's common sense!

And yet of course I'm getting replies that do exactly that because of how darn defensive people need to be about it.

Re: Learn Go in five minutes

#84

Post by djeiasbsbo »

diehunde wrote: post #70

Something it's missing in the CS teaching industry is material (and probably a method too) for experienced programmers who want to learn a new language. It's so hard to find resources to learn the spirit and philosophy behind a language and at the same time learn the syntax without spending time on basic stuff like declaring variables or functions.

I don't think that there is a lack of material, almost every new language has an extensive documentation. I did have to learn how to read something that takes more than a couple days/weekends though, but now I mostly have no problem with documentation.

I do still have trouble with standards or other huge documents, e.g. the Arm Architecture Manual. The kind of documents that are huge, yet assume a lot of previous knowledge so a lot of googling has to be done.

Re: Learn Go in five minutes

#85

Post by whalesalad »

No offense to the author here ... but I need to vent some personal frustration. Every tutorial goes through these exact same motions for learning a new language. It sucks! Programmers can figure out what a variable is, or how to use an array or a map. Those things really don't change a whole lot between languages. What about how to import code from different modules? Best practices for organizing code? How your language differs from its competitors as far as usage. Testing practices (which often influence how your code is written), etc...

Learning Elixir was tough for me until I found Dave Thomas' "Elixir for Programmers" where he skipped all of the basic stuff that every programmer is assumed to know and went right to what makes Elixir unique and how to leverage it correctly. (https://codestool.coding-gnome.com/courses/elixir-for-progra...)

I have been hunting for the same thing for the Go language for years because frankly I haven't been able to grok the appeal. I am hoping to find a 'Go for Programmers' one day. I asked on Reddit a while back and was pretty much handed the "what are variables" document.

Re: Learn Go in five minutes

#86

Post by url00 »

whalesalad wrote: post #85

No offense to the author here ... but I need to vent some personal frustration. Every tutorial goes through these exact same motions for learning a new language. It sucks! Programmers can figure out what a variable is, or how to use an array or a map. Those things really don't change a whole lot between languages. What about how to import code from different modules? Best practices for organizing code? How your langu…

This 100x. If you find it please share with the rest of us!

Re: Learn Go in five minutes

#87

Post by nickelcitymario »

whalesalad wrote: post #85

No offense to the author here ... but I need to vent some personal frustration. Every tutorial goes through these exact same motions for learning a new language. It sucks! Programmers can figure out what a variable is, or how to use an array or a map. Those things really don't change a whole lot between languages. What about how to import code from different modules? Best practices for organizing code? How your langu…

> How your language differs from its competitors as far as usage.

Yes! I'm always tempted to ask "How is this different or better than XYZ lang?"

I don't have the time/inclination to learn every new fangled language that comes by, so it would be nice to have an easy way to understand what scenarios any given language is best suited for.

For example, every time I read about Go, I'm left wondering: How is this better than C or Java? Presumably it's better in some ways I'm not perceiving, otherwise why would it be built and used?

Re: Learn Go in five minutes

#89

Post by dpc_pw »

whalesalad wrote: post #85

No offense to the author here ... but I need to vent some personal frustration. Every tutorial goes through these exact same motions for learning a new language. It sucks! Programmers can figure out what a variable is, or how to use an array or a map. Those things really don't change a whole lot between languages. What about how to import code from different modules? Best practices for organizing code? How your langu…

Seconded. Especially for Go, because it's mostly a lowest common denominator of language features it's not hard to write the code itself. The problem is that the module system is different and had plenty of changes along the years, What I would really like is an up to date "learn how to handle Go project in 30 minutes" tutorial (initialize new project with all best practices, add modules, publish, fork&clone&submit&pr including 3rd party submodules, test, CI, profile, debug).

Re: Learn Go in five minutes

#90

Post by codenlearn »

whalesalad wrote: post #85

No offense to the author here ... but I need to vent some personal frustration. Every tutorial goes through these exact same motions for learning a new language. It sucks! Programmers can figure out what a variable is, or how to use an array or a map. Those things really don't change a whole lot between languages. What about how to import code from different modules? Best practices for organizing code? How your langu…

One resource that atleast comes close to what you are talking about is the information at go101.org, not sure if you have seen this before. Especially the section on Go Type System and Concurrent Programming is really very good and they focus on how to leverage the feature correctly for the most part. Hopefully you like it https://go101.org/article/101.html
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