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

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

#381

Post by Ar-Curunir »

mause_piep wrote: post #378
Mawr wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What an extremely convenient template to dismiss any nuanced argument against "worse is better". Nuance is exactly what I'm arguing for, there's none in the article. > You even get to question my credentials a couple times! (I apparently pick metrics that are convenient to my argument, and fundamentally misunderstand programming language design). You're right, I apologize. I usually try hard to never directly addre…

Agreed. I just want to make clear that Rust/Ada/etc. don't give correctness guarantees! Their compiler is just more enforcing. It's all not black and white. Rust is promoted for its correctness, but those correctness related bugs Rust prevents are an extremely low fraction of real world bugs (comparing to managed memory languages). I mean, how many type-system related bugs are there in real world projects with Java,…

Null pointer bugs are prevented by idiomatic use of Option in Rust, so that’s at least one case where Rust’s focus on correctness prevents memory-safety bugs.

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

#382

Post by Ar-Curunir »

mjr00 wrote: post #63
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…

> 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…

This just sounds like the same arguments that have been made for C for ages. The complexity of programming is pushed out from the language into the program, the tools, and the programmer’s head. It’s not often that that’s a worthwhile trade-off

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

#383

Post by OvermindDL1 »

jeroenhd wrote: post #107
klodolph wrote: post #84

Yes, the cross-platform stuff sucks on Windows. I’ve seen languages with a few different approaches, I’d like a moment to compare them here. I’m going to talk about some specific aspects of cross-platform compatibility but not attempt to compare one single aspect across many platforms. With C++, you can use the preprocessor to give you a string type which is UTF-8 (nominally) when compiled on Unix and UTF-16 (nominal…

The unfortunate story of Windows is that it tried to do UTF before UTF8 was invented. Java has the same issue. UTF16 existed before UTF8 and now UTF8 has become the norm. That's why you have to deal with wchar_t and other such nonsense in low level languages. As for C++, the standard library has create_directory ( https://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/filesystem/create_director... ) in the std::filesystem namespace, taki…

Rust may give a subset of file system functionality that all general file systems should in theory support in the front interface, but you can access platform specific functionality by asking for the extended interface, which you put inside a platform check block. You have the full functionality there.

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

#384

Post by xigoi »

throwaway894345 wrote: post #307
LandR wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know how people can say go "gets out of the way". Go makes me write dozens of lines of code to do something simple that in an any modern language takes a few. It doesn't get out of the way, it gets in the way constantly. I'm constantly thinking in any modern language I can just do X, but in Go with its myriad missing features I have to sit and think about how I'm going to do it with just loops and if statemen…

Most programmers aren't bottlenecked by keyboard proficiency, but rather by dealing with poor tooling or gratuitously complex programs ("terse" doesn't entail "simple", and very often it's the inverse).

That's a strawman. We're not advocating for terseness in character count (otherwise we'd be using languages like APL and Jelly), but for better abstractions. There are other benefits than character count.

* Having a lot of repetitive code makes it easy to make a mistake when you edit one copy and forget about the others. * A lack of abstraction can obscure intent, making you focus on implementation details. * Having less code overall makes it easier to keep track of it in your head.

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

#385

Post by bjourne »

DenseComet wrote: post #223
bjourne wrote: post #130

A lot of the criticism is fair but not the part about runtime os detection. It is vastly preferable over conditional compilation since it is much easier to test. With conditional compilation you introduce code paths that are only traversed on, say, Windows. If most developers use, say, Linux you will introduce difficult-to-debug system-dependent bugs. This goes for similar things like SIMD-extensions too. If possible…

What? Even with runtime os detection, you won't be running linux code paths on windows. However you do it, you can't test linux apis on windows or windows apis on linux natively.

Yes, you can accomplish that using proxies and/or using the Wine libs.

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

#387

Post by account42 »

jeroenhd wrote: post #107
klodolph wrote: post #84

Yes, the cross-platform stuff sucks on Windows. I’ve seen languages with a few different approaches, I’d like a moment to compare them here. I’m going to talk about some specific aspects of cross-platform compatibility but not attempt to compare one single aspect across many platforms. With C++, you can use the preprocessor to give you a string type which is UTF-8 (nominally) when compiled on Unix and UTF-16 (nominal…

The unfortunate story of Windows is that it tried to do UTF before UTF8 was invented. Java has the same issue. UTF16 existed before UTF8 and now UTF8 has become the norm. That's why you have to deal with wchar_t and other such nonsense in low level languages. As for C++, the standard library has create_directory ( https://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/filesystem/create_director... ) in the std::filesystem namespace, taki…

> The unfortunate story of Windows is that it tried to do UTF before UTF8 was invented. Java has the same issue. UTF16 existed before UTF8 and now UTF8 has become the norm. That's why you have to deal with wchar_t and other such nonsense in low level languages.

UTF-8 was first implemented in 1992 while UTF-16 was specified in 1996. Windows and Java use UTF-8 because they retconned their UCS-2 APIs to expect UTF-16 rather than add UTF-8 support. For Windows this is especially damning as they already had a API for encodings with 8-bit code units which they didn't bother adding UTF-8 support to until very recently.

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

#388

Post by likortera »

I think Go is a great tool, if you use for the problems it was intended to solve. Replacing something you otherwise would have built with C, C++ or maybe Java.

The problem is when people try to use it for *everything*, like web applications or just the backend of web applications, where you need a TON of "webby" stuff such as dealing with sessions, authentication, orms, validations, translations, etc.... for these use cases boring and (more dynamic) languages such as Python, Ruby, PHP or JavaScript are much better options.

If you use Go because otherwise you'd had to use C or C++ and you're writing a database, a DNS server, a command line application, or some hardcore infrastructure service, it's an awesome tool and a big improvement, definitely go for it, will make everything easier.

If you use Go because of hate against other languages and because it is better for everything than everything else and only dinosaurs are using scripting languages, etc, etc (my experience with most people around me using Go) then you're using the wrong tool.

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

#389

Post by Cthulhu_ »

reedjosh wrote: post #122
jitl wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Everyth…

> It is tedious. > to reduce the variance between the best programmer on a project and the worst. In my experience the only way this can be done as with trying to level anything is to bring down the level of the best. I find this awful.

> In my experience the only way this can be done as with trying to level anything is to bring down the level of the best.

> I find this awful.

It mitigates risk; if "the best" is at a level above the other developers, to the point where a lot of things hinge on this individual, it's a huge company risk. You never want to rely on "the best"; see also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bus_factor

Go is a language that tells people to put their ego aside. The problem you're solving is already complicated enough, no need to add complexity with a complex language. Dumb and verbose code is better than concise but complex and hard to comprehend code.

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

#390

Post by Cthulhu_ »

mathattack wrote: post #164
reedjosh wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It is tedious. > to reduce the variance between the best programmer on a project and the worst. In my experience the only way this can be done as with trying to level anything is to bring down the level of the best. I find this awful.

For small companies, variance can be good. For large companies, avoiding surprises is everything. So they cram a bunch of processes to make everyone a B player. That’s great if you’re naturally a C player, and can be less work if you’re a B+ player who wants to coast. But it’s hell hell if you’re an A player who is now working with handcuffs, and getting paid the same as the C player.

Can you consider yourself an A player if you think yourself too good to work with B / C players in a language that, as you say, handcuffs you? I mean it frees you up mentally to think about the bigger problems, beyond the bit of code you're working on right now.

In the end, the person writing the code is just a cog in the machine. You can try and pretend you're an Important cog by being Very Clever and using very smart code, but in the end you're not actually important. If you want to be important, you need to let that code go and move up, towards architecture and company level.

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