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Lies we tell ourselves to keep using Golang

fasterthanli.me

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Re: Lies we tell ourselves to keep using Golang

#291

Post by samhw »

rob74 wrote: post #14
jamesmunns wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The last time his "I want off" article was reposted[0], the comments were pretty rough, ranging from ad-hom attacks to (at best) misunderstandings of the arguments he was making. I see this article being an address to these criticisms (which are not limited to this forum, I've seen similar arguments on twitter, etc.). Pointing out shortcomings isn't really impolite or unfair. The author specifically mentioned shortco…

Pointing out shortcomings isn't impolite - writing that Go wasn't designed, but happened by accident is however (IMHO).

> writing that Go wasn't designed, but happened by accident is however [impolite]

That's one of the most mild and inoffensive criticisms I've ever read on the internet. You can't seriously be indignant about that.

Re: Lies we tell ourselves to keep using Golang

#292

Post by whimsicalism »

sph wrote: post #176
gjsman-1000 wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the second day in a row where a post about Go in a negative light was flagged. The first one was an extremely detailed criticism, maintained the front page, and was flagged like crazy. What gives?

This is the second day in a row where a post about Go _from the same blog_ has been posted. I think that's enough, especially since it's mostly a knee jerk reaction from that very HN post from yesterday. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31191700

What makes a reaction knee jerk? Is it just not liking it?

Re: Lies we tell ourselves to keep using Golang

#294

Post by AnimalMuppet »

14113 wrote: post #65
kitd wrote: post #12

The author obviously doesn't like Go. Ok, he can have his own opinions. I've been coding professionally since 1987, using everything from mainframe assembler, Fortran, C, VB, Java, C++, to most recently Go. IMHO, the language itself plays a smaller role in its usefulness than most think. As important is the tooling, stdlib, ecosystem, community and "StackOverflow"-ability. Go has a few warts, like every language, but…

From the article: "[...] as developers get more and more senior, they tend to ignore more and more problems, because they've gotten so used to it. That's the way it's always been done, and they've learned to live with them, so they've stopped questioning it any more."

As developers get more and more senior, they have a different perspective on what constitutes a "serious" problem. Also, as developers get more experience with a language, they get better at doing things in ways that are idiomatic for that language - they work with the language instead of against it.

Take Haskell. If I were a Haskell novice, and tried to do everything procedurally with do notation, and then complained that Haskell had all these problems, would that make Haskell a bad language? No. Would it mean that all Haskell programmers were telling themselves lies in order to keep using it? No. It would mean that I was using it badly.

If I were a brand new programmer, and took up Java, I might well complain about "public static void main(String[] args)". But an experienced programmer would brush that off, telling me that that's just syntax - there are real problems with Java, but that isn't one.

So this particular statement, that senior and more experienced devs ignore more and more problems, isn't proof of anything. It's particularly not proof that developers have to keep lying to themselves in order to keep using Go. (They may, but this isn't proof.)

Re: Lies we tell ourselves to keep using Golang

#295

Post by samhw »

clpm4j wrote: post #271
rob74 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pointing out shortcomings isn't impolite - writing that Go wasn't designed, but happened by accident is however (IMHO).

Especially since it was designed by computer science luminaries who are almost certainly better programmers/engineers than the author of this blog. It's also more accurate to say that Rust wasn't designed / was an accident since it was technically a side project of one guy at Mozilla.

Both languages were designed by probably better programmers than most in this thread. For that matter, the vast majority of successful programming languages surely were. I'm utterly lost at how that relates to anything.

One can plainly be a good programmer and yet create a bad language. I'm sure you are well-informed enough to analyse his argument on its merits, even if it were written by a gang of monkeys with typewriters.

Re: Lies we tell ourselves to keep using Golang

#296

Post by busterarm »

whimsicalism wrote: post #289
busterarm wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I will say that playing around with Rust was an enjoyable experience, but it still has some warts where I think it's not quite ready for serious work yet (even though serious work is being done with it). These days I find myself leaning heavily on either Haskell or Elixir/Erlang's ecosystem (with a preference for the latter). Or JavaScript (there's just an order of magnitude more jobs)...

I find it difficult to see a standard where Rust is not ready for "serious work" but Haskell is.

I can install a working Haskell toolchain with my package manager instead of the farcical `curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -sSf https://sh.rustup.rs | sh`.

If you're an automation-oriented kind of person like it's my job to be, setting up repeatable toolchians based around the above is a total crock of shit.

Re: Lies we tell ourselves to keep using Golang

#297

Post by sophacles »

yegle wrote: post #121
14113 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the article: "[...] as developers get more and more senior, they tend to ignore more and more problems, because they've gotten so used to it. That's the way it's always been done, and they've learned to live with them, so they've stopped questioning it any more."

Hmm won't this apply to any language and therefore not a valid argument? A: language FOO is a great language! B: You are telling lies because you are fluent in this language and ignore the problems in the language.

Yes. This is true of any environment. That's why I ask new hires to write down every WTF moment, every question and every idea for improvement they have as they get up to speed on our systems. Just because I'm used to avoiding a problem doesn't mean the problem must exist.

Re: Lies we tell ourselves to keep using Golang

#298

Post by masklinn »

ibejoeb wrote: post #28
asxc11 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I might not agree with fasterthanlime's opinion on Go (9/10 times I would opt to use Go over Rust), but calling this post a "shitpost" is unnecessarily dismissive. The post, like his previous post on Go, contain well thought out points that add to the discussion at the very least. Also I like his sense of humour :) Edit: though, I suppose saying Go is not designed is also equally unnecessarily dismissive and hyperbol…

> Portland Oregon, the capital of grunge, coffee, poor weather and whiteness it's kinda a shitpost

They're funny(ish) asides which is pretty normal for lime.

Re: Lies we tell ourselves to keep using Golang

#299

Post by whimsicalism »

busterarm wrote: post #296
whimsicalism wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find it difficult to see a standard where Rust is not ready for "serious work" but Haskell is.

I can install a working Haskell toolchain with my package manager instead of the farcical `curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -sSf https://sh.rustup.rs | sh`. If you're an automation-oriented kind of person like it's my job to be, setting up repeatable toolchians based around the above is a total crock of shit.

If you think this is one of your stronger arguments, I think my point has been made.

Re: Lies we tell ourselves to keep using Golang

#300

Post by hnlmorg »

14113 wrote: post #65
kitd wrote: post #12

The author obviously doesn't like Go. Ok, he can have his own opinions. I've been coding professionally since 1987, using everything from mainframe assembler, Fortran, C, VB, Java, C++, to most recently Go. IMHO, the language itself plays a smaller role in its usefulness than most think. As important is the tooling, stdlib, ecosystem, community and "StackOverflow"-ability. Go has a few warts, like every language, but…

From the article: "[...] as developers get more and more senior, they tend to ignore more and more problems, because they've gotten so used to it. That's the way it's always been done, and they've learned to live with them, so they've stopped questioning it any more."

He made some good points in the article but this particular paragraph stuck out as being hypocritical. The entire motivation of him writing this was because he felt people dismissed his previous article out of hand. And then he makes a remark that preemptively dismisses any rebuttal out of hand (and as others have pointed out, can equally apply to any language so hardly a point worth complaining against Go specifically).
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