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Go 1.18

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Re: Go 1.18

#41

Post by lolinder »

icholy wrote: post #10
echelon wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Counter point: Generics make me far more inclined to use Go regularly. If error handling is improved to be safer and more ergonomic, it'll be incredibly compelling for me. Generics were the biggest feature keeping me from using the language, and now that's a done deal. I'm excited.

If you consider the adoption rate, it's pretty clear that the people who avoid Go because of are a vocal minority.

Can you point me to a survey that shows that a majority of developers would like to try Go? If not, how can you be so sure that those who avoid it because of are a minority?

As a counterpoint, here's a survey that suggests that only 14.54% of developers have any interest in learning Go. How many of those who don't are turned off by lack of features? I don't know, but I'm not sure how you could either.

https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2021#most-loved-dr...

Re: Go 1.18

#42

Post by ainar-g »

candiddevmike wrote: post #32

Personally, I'm waiting until 1.19 to start seriously exploring generics. By then, the dust will have settled a bit, folks will have some good lessons learned to share, and there may be more packages in the stdlib for generics.

I feel like a lot of people will wait (although perhaps not up until 1.19) for the simple reason that tooling support is still not quite there yet. See [1] and the related issues. Static code analysis is reasonably popular in Go projects, and just disabling all failing tools until the tooling is there is not something most people would agree to, I think.

With that said, of the tools that I use about ⅔ are already reasonably compatible. Unfortunately, the other ⅓ are among the most essential ones.

[1]: https://github.com/golang/go/issues/48525

Re: Go 1.18

#43

Post by quaunaut »

candiddevmike wrote: post #38
philosopher1234 wrote: post #3

This is very exciting! Generics will be helpful for some, I'm sure, but my reading of the winds is that people will find other idiosyncracies of Go to latch onto and complain about. It seems to me the next object of hatred is the lack of sum types. I would like to understand a bit more about where a lot of the Go criticism comes from. Of course some amount of it comes from direct frustrations people have with the lan…

I think Go's criticisms come from elitism more than anything--folks can't flex their algebraic programming muscles and instead have to do error checking inline or do some WET things due to lack of generics like some amateur. To me, Go is never the wrong choice, but it may not be the best choice for some projects.

I'm not sure it's elitism to be looking for type-system features that are well-over a decade old and generally non-controversial and considered vast positives.

I don't think they necessarily need to go crazy in this regard(as simplicity is one of Go's best strengths), but I don't think it's elitism.

Re: Go 1.18

#44

Post by scottjg »

FpUser wrote: post #36
andrewf wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work at a Go shop that was a Python + RoR shop when I joined. I don't dispute Go's benefits at our scale. As a matter of personal preference, I don't enjoy Go. Go is Blub ( http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html ). I think the industry is in a place where Blub makes sense! Lots of VC money is floating around, and schools are training a lot of people to hire with that money. Commercially relevant ideas most often succee…

Quite frankly Paul's article makes little sense to me. Unless you trying to code in some brainfuck using language A vs language B is of little concern from my experience. I will of course exclude cases when language is simply and obviously unsuitable for the domain. Writing low level video codec in Python is definitely not the best idea. Quality of the programmers on the other hand matters more.

Paul is famous for his essay about Lisp - arguing that his startup beat other startups because Lisp is such a better language than C++ or Java which his competitors were using.

Unclear to me if this is really the meaningful reason that Paul's company succeeded (I'd say obsession with programming languages can be a counter-indicator for productivity), but it clearly resonated with a lot of people since that essay is arguably the onramp into Paul's fame. A lot of programmers read that essay back in 2001. His popularity as an investor who understood engineers arguably catapulted YCombinator

Re: Go 1.18

#46

Post by philosopher1234 »

gerbilly wrote: post #20
philosopher1234 wrote: post #3

This is very exciting! Generics will be helpful for some, I'm sure, but my reading of the winds is that people will find other idiosyncracies of Go to latch onto and complain about. It seems to me the next object of hatred is the lack of sum types. I would like to understand a bit more about where a lot of the Go criticism comes from. Of course some amount of it comes from direct frustrations people have with the lan…

> I would like to understand a bit more about where a lot of the Go criticism comes from. Go is really s souped up version of C. It's a design rooted in the 70s with some fixes to make it a good language for writing small networked apps. Insofar as that goes¹, the language is fine. However the creators of Go responded to critiques of the language in a patronizing manner and talked down to their own programming commun…

I’m glad you brought this up because I agree Rob pikes quote about go being simple for average programmers has been very provocative, because it’s been interpreted as “Google devs are too stupid for a good language like Haskell, so if you use go it’s because you’re stupid too”.

I’m partial to a different interpretation, that’s more like “go doesn’t require as much thinking as Haskell, so you can use your thinking for the problem you’re trying to solve instead of the language”.

With that interpretation, go is better not just for stupid programmers, but even for the smartest programmers.

Re: Go 1.18

#47

Post by ______-_-______ »

ainar-g wrote: post #28
gerbilly wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I would like to understand a bit more about where a lot of the Go criticism comes from. Go is really s souped up version of C. It's a design rooted in the 70s with some fixes to make it a good language for writing small networked apps. Insofar as that goes¹, the language is fine. However the creators of Go responded to critiques of the language in a patronizing manner and talked down to their own programming commun…

> However the creators of Go responded to critiques of the language in a patronizing manner and talked down to their own programming community at Google as being unable to handle complex languages. Can you provide examples of that? Because the closest thing I can remember is Go creators saying that C++ had too many features interacting in weird ways, and that they wanted to avoid that. Which is a perfectly normal des…

Here's the original Rob Pike quote:

> The key point here is our programmers are Googlers, they’re not researchers. They’re typically, fairly young, fresh out of school, probably learned Java, maybe learned C or C++, probably learned Python. They’re not capable of understanding a brilliant language but we want to use them to build good software. So, the language that we give them has to be easy for them to understand and easy to adopt.

The source seems to be MSDN, but the link has bit-rotted. https://channel9.msdn.com/Events/Lang-NEXT/Lang-NEXT-2014/Fr...

This attitude I think is the reason most experienced deveploers I've worked with are put off by the language. You don't have to be a "researcher" to understand sum types or generics. There's a large part of the industry that thinks we should limit ourselves to concepts that can be understood by a beginner, and I think it's holding the industry back. I can't think of another industry where people think this way.

Re: Go 1.18

#48

Post by justinsaccount »

Generics is the big news, but the fuzzing support is amazing too. I added a fuzz test to an app I have in about 5 minutes. It was no harder than adding a normal test.

I expect to see a huge boon in users of fuzzing techniques which will benefit projects across the board.

Re: Go 1.18

#49

Post by throwaway894345 »

candiddevmike wrote: post #38
philosopher1234 wrote: post #3

This is very exciting! Generics will be helpful for some, I'm sure, but my reading of the winds is that people will find other idiosyncracies of Go to latch onto and complain about. It seems to me the next object of hatred is the lack of sum types. I would like to understand a bit more about where a lot of the Go criticism comes from. Of course some amount of it comes from direct frustrations people have with the lan…

I think Go's criticisms come from elitism more than anything--folks can't flex their algebraic programming muscles and instead have to do error checking inline or do some WET things due to lack of generics like some amateur. To me, Go is never the wrong choice, but it may not be the best choice for some projects.

I'm a Go proponent, but I also feel this. Sometimes I want to be very abstract and clever. I've written a static site generator in Rust, not because a Go version would be too slow or error prone, but because I liked the idea of being gratuitously abstract and efficient. I feel clever and I like the aesthetic of very abstract programs. But this is almost always at-odds with the objectives of software development--very abstract/terse code is often much harder to understand than concrete/verbose code. There are significant material advantages to being able to onboard a developer with zero language experience to a project in a matter of hours rather than weeks or months.

Re: Go 1.18

#50

Post by [deleted] »

FpUser wrote: post #36
andrewf wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work at a Go shop that was a Python + RoR shop when I joined. I don't dispute Go's benefits at our scale. As a matter of personal preference, I don't enjoy Go. Go is Blub ( http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html ). I think the industry is in a place where Blub makes sense! Lots of VC money is floating around, and schools are training a lot of people to hire with that money. Commercially relevant ideas most often succee…

Quite frankly Paul's article makes little sense to me. Unless you trying to code in some brainfuck using language A vs language B is of little concern from my experience. I will of course exclude cases when language is simply and obviously unsuitable for the domain. Writing low level video codec in Python is definitely not the best idea. Quality of the programmers on the other hand matters more.

[deleted]
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