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I want off Mr. Golang’s Wild Ride (2020)

fasterthanli.me

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Re: I want off Mr. Golang’s Wild Ride (2020)

#4

Post by andrew_ »

> It is a minefield of subtle gotchas that have very real implications

Perfectly describes my 10+ years with the Node ecosystem. Not that it's a bad thing necessarily. I've made it my niche and the knowledge I've accumulated has made for a great career. But still, I understand the narrative.

Re: I want off Mr. Golang’s Wild Ride (2020)

#8

Post by DrBazza »

andrew_ wrote: post #5
Zababa wrote: post #2

Probably needs a (2020) in the title.

Not a "Go guy" but I try to keep up on the news. They've since added generics and cleaned up some of this since 2020 yeah?

This submission came up because the article author is on twitter today complaining about golang and posted the submission link.

Re: I want off Mr. Golang’s Wild Ride (2020)

#9

Post by lumost »

My Anecdotal Experience:

Golang is great for spinning up new services and tools with very little overhead, the language is well designed for the backend - and the lack of avoids "odd" decisions which other engineers will dislike in the future. If your job is building lots of new things using relatively common building blocks, then Golang looks fantastic!

However on mature services, engineers often need because they are dealing with something extremely complex. The author of this blog post digs into the scenario for a package which needs to support different non-nix operating systems, but the same can be true of an app which has to manage many different kinds of objects (Kubernetes, or any service with many DAOs). Alternately there are engineers building all kinds of weird software which may do new things in novel simplified ways. Golang occasionally makes expressing these types of applications more difficult.

Overall I enjoyed my time writing go, until I tried to write a statistics based application for a startup idea back in 2016. The project didn't get very far, and that was partly due to me getting bored having to deal with all of the different numeric data types, at the time the lack of generics made it so that you either had to use reflection - or implement the same function N times over to support the different numeric data types. This tedium killed my love of the language (I'm sure it's a better experience in 2022).

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