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Lies we tell ourselves to keep using Golang

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Re: Lies we tell ourselves to keep using Golang

#341

Post by palmtree3000 »

hintymad wrote: post #249

I'm not sure why choice of programming language is such a heated topic. "Want to use Java? Over my dead body", said a ex-Uber employee. "Let's rewrite Kafka in Rust to avoid using Java in our team", said an employee in a $10B+ unicorn. "Go is a plague. Let's use Rust", said an employee in another $5B+ unicorn. Doesn't language itself contribute just a small portion to our productivity? The platforms and ecosystems of…

> I'm not sure why choice of programming language is such a heated topic.

I think there are two reasons.

First, languages live or die by their ecosystems. If you love a language, it's very much in your interest for other people to use it, so they write code that you can use.

Second, most programming happens at work. Most people don't get to choose what programming language they write at work: they're locked into whatever choice somebody else made. The more popular your language is, the more likely that choice is to be made in your favor (or alternatively, the easier it'll be to find a job where that choice has been made in your favor). If I want to write Idris at work, well, tough luck.

Both of these are largely zero-sum, which makes things worse. It's not 100% zero-sum, in that if you manage to light a passion for in somebody they might write code (in that language) that might not have been written at all. But mostly language evangelism won't change the total number of programming hours per year (or the number of available programming jobs), so all that's left is to fight over who gets how much.

So if you care a lot about which programming language you write, I don't think it's odd to come at it from combative angle: it's a fight! Some will lose and some will win, so you better try and be one of the winners.

Re: Lies we tell ourselves to keep using Golang

#342

Post by __jem »

busterarm wrote: post #305
whimsicalism wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Getting this right should be table stakes. Every non-Rustacean who has suddenly had Rust forced into their workflows asks for this to be solved, specifically, and the Rust community keeps digging its heels in. Haskell has its warts but it's not 101-level shit like this.

"Getting this right" is a matter of opinion, and either way, rust can be installed a variety of ways. Your argument is literally nonsensical and demonstrates a seriously arrogance and lack of familiarity with what you're talking about.

Re: Lies we tell ourselves to keep using Golang

#343

Post by Thaxll »

busterarm wrote: post #267
Thaxll wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Why are my TCP connections not closing? Why am I encountering port exhaustion?" This has nothing to do with Go. You're implying Go has a bug in its TCP implementation which I assume is false. Networking works just fine in Go and it's actually easy to use. https://pkg.go.dev/net Edit: I'm getting downvoted but please share with TCP issues in Go.

The author of the blog post literally covered it in the article he wrote two years prior that's linked in the first sentence. It's not "TCP issues in Go" it's "Go leaves you to figure these things out for yourself and write bad code that doesn't work if you don't thoroughly understand its gotchas." Also, if you've been following Go over the years, you'll know that there's basically _always_ open issues ( https://gith…

Hmm not really, the only thing is the default http client that has no time out which is the case in many languages. The only issue I had was about idle connection and DNS resolution.

And the ticket you show does not show any issues on the Go side.

Re: Lies we tell ourselves to keep using Golang

#344

Post by dragonwriter »

hintymad wrote: post #249

I'm not sure why choice of programming language is such a heated topic. "Want to use Java? Over my dead body", said a ex-Uber employee. "Let's rewrite Kafka in Rust to avoid using Java in our team", said an employee in a $10B+ unicorn. "Go is a plague. Let's use Rust", said an employee in another $5B+ unicorn. Doesn't language itself contribute just a small portion to our productivity? The platforms and ecosystems of…

> I'm not sure why choice of programming language is such a heated topic.

Because the market identifies job suitability by years of experience with a particular tool, so the popularity (in the market) of tooling a programmer has experience with is intimately tied to their job opportunities and financial prospects.

If you are an “X programmer“, attacks on X are attacks on your livelihood. Conversely, if there is an abundance of Y programmers, convincing people that X, which far fewer are proficient in but where you are one of them, is superior for some high-value domain, is enhancing your livelihood.

You’ve seen informercials exaggerating the negatives of alternatives while hyping a product in order to sell it? Well, while it's framed as being about tooling that's one step removed, that's basically what programmers are doing in language flamewars.

Re: Lies we tell ourselves to keep using Golang

#345

Post by [deleted] »

steveklabnik wrote: post #327
busterarm wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Which package manager do you use that doesn't have rustc and cargo packaged yet?

[deleted]

Re: Lies we tell ourselves to keep using Golang

#346

Post by samhw »

howinteresting wrote: post #324
samhw wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quoted post unavailable.

I know many trans people who use nonstandard pronouns like xe, ze or it.

Sorry, that's true, I didn't mean that literally no trans people (or gay people, black people, etc) use non-standard pronouns. I meant that it has nothing to do with their being gay or trans. Certainly some people may happen to be trans and also happen to use those pronouns.

Re: Lies we tell ourselves to keep using Golang

#347

Post by Thaxll »

cytzol wrote: post #229
HL33tibCe7 wrote: post #98

The author writes well and makes compelling points. His "I want to get off Mr Golang's Wild Ride" post is good too. But I don't find myself agreeing with his position, which is "you shouldn't use Go for production services" (he explicitly says this in one of his Go posts, I forget which one and don't have time to look right now). The better alternative to Go is Rust. Okay, sure, I'm willing to admit that in the examp…

> Programming is a means to an end, and the cost of using Rust (hiring, increased development time) is often not worth it. I agree with this. I learnt Rust before Go, and using Go makes me feel like The Oatmeal piracy guy[1]: "I'm not sure if I should use Go to write this HTTP service. I'd lose immutability tracking, I'd lose compiler-enforced thread safety, I'd lose the powerful type system, I'd lose the comprehensi…

The problem with:

"I'm not sure if I should use Go to write this HTTP service. I'd lose immutability tracking, I'd lose compiler-enforced thread safety, I'd lose the powerful type system, I'd lose the comprehensive error handling, I'd suffer from a million little papercuts, I'd have to use the weird date formatting system, I'd have to check nil pointers, I'd...

None of the modern language do it beside Rust so every language are then bad?

Re: Lies we tell ourselves to keep using Golang

#348

Post by randomdata »

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 tend to ignore more and more problems, because they've gotten so used to it.

I've been coding professionally since the 90s. The last project I worked on was in Go. It was pleasant and surprisingly productive. A few warts, like the parent said, but all told it was a great experience. I'm now working on a Typescript project. It is painful. Typescript itself is quite nice, but the deep problems with the rest of the ecosystem have not gone unnoticed.

Re: Lies we tell ourselves to keep using Golang

#349

Post by samhw »

npe wrote: post #190
samhw wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's possible to implement CSP channels in most languages, but they're not first-class like go. But does that matter ? In all my experience, I can't think of any instances where that wouldn't be a distinction without a difference. (Perhaps I'm missing something, though.)

It matters a lot IMO. Most systems programming languages can implement whatever concurrency primitives you care to use, but most people default to whatever is provided by the OS/language because concurrency is hard. Having first-class syntactic sugar over a concurrent runtime bakes in a certain programming style in the language, which strongly determines how the language is used and the programming style. Go comes ou…

I think there's a difference between 'in the standard library' and 'in the language', though. They seem to be praising Go for doing the latter. And the technical language in which it was expressed gave me to think there was some technical motivation for that, as opposed to sociological - but if what they meant is what you said, then I certainly wouldn't disagree with that.

Re: Lies we tell ourselves to keep using Golang

#350

Post by gkfasdfasdf »

dang wrote: post #263
rmasters wrote: post #151

Flagging this post strikes me as shameful censorship of an unpopular opinion. You may say it's the snark/anger/frustration that got flagged, but I suspect it would not have been flagged if the topic were different. Presuming the author is making bad-faith arguments for internet blog points goes against the spirit of HN. I prefer to draw my own conclusions, thank you. I normally expect HN to take the higher ground wit…

> You may say it's the snark/anger/frustration that got flagged, but I suspect it would not have been flagged if the topic were different. HN has had plenty of threads about Go over the years. What's different here is that there was just a big Go flamewar yesterday ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31191700 ), from the same site. Having another big Go flamewar the next day is a really bad idea, because then on t…

I learned a great deal from the article. Thankfully I discovered it from twitter. If flame wars are the issue, then the thread should be locked, rather than pulling it from the front page. Really disappointed in this move.
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