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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)

#61

Post by shadowgovt »

nmilo wrote: post #51

I see this point everywhere about Rust's union types and it always kind of irks me: > The point is, this [Result type] makes it impossible for us to access an invalid/uninitialized/null Metadata. With a Go function, if you ignore the returned error, you still get the result - most probably a null pointer. It's all about framing. You can just as equally say it is "impossible" to access an invalid Go FileInfo, because…

The difference is what the language makes easy to do and how it signals to you you're about to do something dangerous.

If you call `.unwrap()`, that's a big yellow flag that you're going to be taking the gloves off and maybe touching something radioactive. Go has the maybe-radioactive thing sitting right there; safely touching it and unsafely touching it look exactly the same.

I generally enjoy using Go, but this is one of the pieces of the language design that I was surprised Go went with; we've known as an industry for decades that including bare null / nil / undefined / whatever we want to call it without type-system assistance is leaving a bare third rail lying around.

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

#62

Post by eklavya »

nmilo wrote: post #51

I see this point everywhere about Rust's union types and it always kind of irks me: > The point is, this [Result type] makes it impossible for us to access an invalid/uninitialized/null Metadata. With a Go function, if you ignore the returned error, you still get the result - most probably a null pointer. It's all about framing. You can just as equally say it is "impossible" to access an invalid Go FileInfo, because…

By extension of that logic, all dynamic languages are as strict as static typed, since it will crash on first abuse.

The benefit is in capturing things in type system so you can see what’s going on and you can’t ignore it. Runtime vs compile time debugging.

Did I get you right?

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

#63

Post by mjr00 »

throwaway894345 wrote: post #37
gambler wrote: post #26

Go has a lot of issues. Some of them would be easily fixable if people promoting and developing Go actually admitted the problems. However, the fanbase usually acts as a cult pretending that issues are features. Thing is, just like broken, hackish dependency "management" had to be fixed (introducing tons of complexity for the sake of not destroying backward compatibility), other problems will have to be fixed as well…

I mean, all programming language communities are partial to their language, but among Go there seems to be an unusual tolerance for disagreement and discussion of language issues compared to most other programming languages. But yeah, when you come in guns blazing talking about how certain language features are "shit" and there's no possibility of elegance, people are rightly going to think you're not there for any s…

> Note that there definitely are PL communities that generally can't handle any criticism irrespective of civility, but the Go community isn't among them. Indeed, in my experience, Go's critics are very often much more zealous than its proponents.

This is because Go is a programming language for people who don't care about programming languages. I mean this in the most positive way possible. If you're using Go, it's because you care about the end result of what you're building, usually a backend service or command-line tooling, far more than the code that was used to create it.

Go is not a language where you come up with clever syntax to solve your problem. Go is not a language that makes you feel smart when you write it. Go is not a fun language to program in. Go is a language that gets out of your way, encourages you to solve your problem in the most boring way possible (usually with a lot of for loops) with a predefined level of safety (i.e. static typing, explicit error handling with the `error` type, etc). It's a language for building bridges, not creating masterpieces.

People who are passionate about programming languages would never like Go in the first place, so you don't get too many zealots to sing its praises.

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

#64

Post by fasterthanlime »

Author here: I wrote this in 2020, have changed jobs twice since. Both jobs involved Go in some capacity, where it's supposed to shine (web services). It has not been a pleasant experience either - I've lost count of the amount of incidents directly caused by poor error handling, or Go default values.

If folks walk away with only one new thought from this, please let it be that: defaults matter. Go lets you whip something up quickly, but making the result "production-ready" is left as an exercise to the writer. Big companies that have adopted it have developed tons of tooling around it, use all available linters, do code generation, check the disassembly, and regularly pay the engineering cost of just using Go at all.

That's not how most Go code is written though. I'm interested not in what the language lets you do, but what is typical for a language - what is idiomatic, what "everyone ends up doing", because it is encouraged.

Because that's the kind of code I inevitably end up being on-call for, and I'm tired of being woken up because of the same classes of preventable errors, all the time. It doesn't matter that I don't personally write Go anymore: it's unescapable. If it's not internal Go code, it's in a SAAS we pay for: and no matter who writes it, it fails in all the same predictable ways.

Generics will not solve this. It is /neat/ that they found a way to sneak them into the language, but it's not gonna change years of poor design decisions, and it's definitely not gonna change the enormous amount of existing Go code out there, especially as the discourse around them not being the usability+performance win everyone thought they would be keeps unfolding.

As I've mentioned recently on Twitter, what makes everything worse is that you cannot replace Go piecemeal once it has taken hold in a codebase: its FFI story is painful, the only good boundary with Go is a network boundary, and there's often a latency concern there.

Lastly: pointing out that I have been teaching Rust is a lazy and dismissive response to this. For me personally, I have found it to be the least awful option in a bunch of cases. I am yearning for even better languages, ones that tackle the same kind of issues but do it even better. I like to remind everyone that we're not out there cheering for sports team, just discussing our tools.

If you're looking to reduce the whole discourse to "X vs Y", let it be "serde vs crossing your fingers and hoping user input is well-formed". It is one of the better reductions of the problem: it really is "specifying behavior that should be allowed (and rejecting everything else)" vs "manually checking that everything is fine in a thousand tiny steps", which inevitably results in missed combinations because the human brain is not designed to hold graphs that big.

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

#65

Post by jitl »

lumost wrote: post #9

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 a…

The Kubernetes codebase is huge, but in my (limited) experience I really felt like it was delivering on Go’s promise: that I can read any given file and understand what’s happening. At least when I needed to debug Kubernetes issues 4 years ago, I could grep around, dive into a file, and command-click to “go to definition” and quickly build a local understanding of the code around my problem. No spooky action. Everything explicit, verbose but plain spoken.

Yes there is a lot of code, but I would be very surprised to be able to dive into a C++, Java, Python, or TypeScript project of the same scope and be anywhere as near productive.

> partly due to me getting bored having to deal with all of the different numeric data types […]. This tedium killed my love of the language (I'm sure it's a better experience in 2022)

That’s the very tradeoff Go is designed to make. It is not expressive. It is tedious. But it’s objective is not to make you as an individual fast. It is to make large programming projects cheaper over the long run, and to reduce the variance between the best programmer on a project and the worst.

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

#66

Post by uuyi »

I don't dislike Go myself but it taught me something important purely due to timing. It's the first language I wasn't late to the party for and got to watch grow up.

But I also watched people skilfully build the same towers of excrement that exist on all other platforms and languages, yet again, in exactly the same way with very little innovation or thought. The end game is that Go is just another loop in the endless cycle of technology replacement which we fail to improve on.

Ergo the language, tooling, wild ride is almost irrelevant and we should look at what we're building with it.

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

#67

Post by kodah »

burnished wrote: post #57
throwaway894345 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, all programming language communities are partial to their language, but among Go there seems to be an unusual tolerance for disagreement and discussion of language issues compared to most other programming languages. But yeah, when you come in guns blazing talking about how certain language features are "shit" and there's no possibility of elegance, people are rightly going to think you're not there for any s…

Huh, I had sort of found the opposite, that the Go community I had interacted with was more aggro and prone to offense. I'm forming this opinion from the reddit and the discord though, so if there is another community you favor I'd genuinely love to hear about it.

Last I checked there GoNuts on Libera, there's the go nuts mailing list, and there's that Slack. I've seen members of all of the above complain and publicly vye for features and fixes.

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

#68

Post by mcronce »

throwaway894345 wrote: post #55
mcronce wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It requires several additional lines of code just to bubble up an error, for starters, and there's nothing stopping you from ignoring errors and continuing with what could easily be corrupt data.

The latter is a much stronger argument than the former (no idea why people get so worked up about character counts), but even then, "shit" is really strong considering how often one experiences exception traces when using an application written in Python or Java or some other exception-based language. Point being, we should probably evaluate error handling schemes based on results rather than ideology (even though I…

Screen real estate is limited, especially vertical real estate. Compared to languages with saner error handling, I can read approximately 25% as much Go code at once. That's a real cognitive burden when maintaining code or learning your way around a new codebase, which seems especially egregious from a language whose community consistently proselytizes about how the lack of language features is great for maintainability and onboarding.

I'd take exceptions any day of the week over Go's solution. I'd much rather the program crash by default than attempt to continue with corrupt data by default. I'd rather have concise, explicit, compiler-required error handling than exceptions, though.

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

#69

Post by throwaway894345 »

burnished wrote: post #57
throwaway894345 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, all programming language communities are partial to their language, but among Go there seems to be an unusual tolerance for disagreement and discussion of language issues compared to most other programming languages. But yeah, when you come in guns blazing talking about how certain language features are "shit" and there's no possibility of elegance, people are rightly going to think you're not there for any s…

Huh, I had sort of found the opposite, that the Go community I had interacted with was more aggro and prone to offense. I'm forming this opinion from the reddit and the discord though, so if there is another community you favor I'd genuinely love to hear about it.

I've had very helpful experiences on Discord (but I don't frequent it). Reddit is Reddit. GitHub (e.g., issue tracker) has been very productive. The mailing list is also productive.

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

#70

Post by thrower123 »

chernevik wrote: post #54
HL33tibCe7 wrote: post #22

Could this post be unflagged please? I don't think it satisfies any requirement for flagging.

Off-topic, but HN needs review of flagging abuse. Maybe assign flagging privileges only to those with X reputation, and revocation if on review the privilege is abused? It seems that flagging is as much "I don't like this" as "this is not appropriate". Likewise downvoting. Maybe instead display both downvotes and upvotes, so people can see if a comment is found controversial?

This is how the system already works...
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