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Go is my hammer, and everything is a nail

maragu.dev

1–10 of 816 posts

Re: Go is my hammer, and everything is a nail

#4
If all you know is a Hammer…

I was searching for reasons why to use the Go-Hammer when there are comparable ones such as Java, C#, etc. but the article left me wanting.

It strikes me that Go is riding the peak of hype languages, succeeding Rust and Node.js (which are all good pieces of technology and absolutely have their merit). And like with most hype driven decisions there is little (self) awareness of context and alternatives.

Note, this is explicitly not about the languages themselves, but rather the larger cult(ure) of mainstream programmers around them.

Re: Go is my hammer, and everything is a nail

#6
For me, expertise in a particular language is rarely very useful. Expertise/specialization is mostly a time tradeoff for particularly thorny issues, but IME they rarely come up in a programming language context (usually it's domain or particular codebase-specific). That being said, Go is a really good "workhorse" language.

Re: Go is my hammer, and everything is a nail

#8

If all you know is a Hammer… I was searching for reasons why to use the Go-Hammer when there are comparable ones such as Java, C#, etc. but the article left me wanting. It strikes me that Go is riding the peak of hype languages, succeeding Rust and Node.js (which are all good pieces of technology and absolutely have their merit). And like with most hype driven decisions there is little (self) awareness of context and…

I think he could have chosen those alternatives just as well, he just happened to pick Go. His argument is that he strives to use his chosen tool in as many situations as possible instead of having a bunch of different ones.

Re: Go is my hammer, and everything is a nail

#9

If all you know is a Hammer… I was searching for reasons why to use the Go-Hammer when there are comparable ones such as Java, C#, etc. but the article left me wanting. It strikes me that Go is riding the peak of hype languages, succeeding Rust and Node.js (which are all good pieces of technology and absolutely have their merit). And like with most hype driven decisions there is little (self) awareness of context and…

> It strikes me that Go is riding the peak of hype languages.

Very much so. Also it seems to be a strange choice as a solo developer when its strengths are explicitly targeted at large organizations. And I think the tooling is actually a bit of a mess compared to some other options. God help you if as a solo developer you start building on top of protobufs (another basically default choice in the Golang world...).

I just don't understand why you wouldn't choose something faster and more expressive.

Re: Go is my hammer, and everything is a nail

#10

If all you know is a Hammer… I was searching for reasons why to use the Go-Hammer when there are comparable ones such as Java, C#, etc. but the article left me wanting. It strikes me that Go is riding the peak of hype languages, succeeding Rust and Node.js (which are all good pieces of technology and absolutely have their merit). And like with most hype driven decisions there is little (self) awareness of context and…

I think it’s fine. Honestly I think there’s a lot more deep developers out there than broad developers. It’s just they don’t blog about depth the way broad developers blog about their shiny new toy.
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