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Go is my hammer, and everything is a nail

maragu.dev

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

#31

Post by azthecx »

busterarm wrote: post #9
DarkNova6 wrote: post #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…

> 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…

Do you have better alternatives to Protobuf?

What are the shortcomings that you find with it? At work these choices have been out of my hands but I've used JSON Avro and Protobuf and I felt like Protobuf was the least prone to errors, best surrounding tooling and easy migrations while maintaining small payloads.

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

#32

Post by azthecx »

busterarm wrote: post #9
DarkNova6 wrote: post #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…

> 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…

Do you have better alternatives to Protobuf?

What are the shortcomings that you find with it? At work these choices have been out of my hands but I've used JSON Avro and Protobuf and I felt like Protobuf was the least prone to errors, best surrounding tooling and easy migrations while maintaining small payloads.

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

#33

Post by the-grump »

the_real_cher wrote: post #24
dimgl wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is unfortunate because I think Go is very useful in a wide variety of business contexts.

Then you would find this article very fortunate.

It would be a misfortune indeed if I had nothing to complain about.

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

#35

Post by nerdponx »

caerwy wrote: post #5

This article is not so much about Go but about choosing to specialize in one language ecosystem instead of spreading one's attention across several.

With the caveat that the broadened perspective you obtain by learning a variety of languages will make you better at your primary language.

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

#38

Post by giraffe_lady »

Thaxll wrote: post #19
busterarm wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Protobuf is not the default in Go the default is REST. What tools are a mess? Go tooling ( runtime ) and IDE integration is very good. Go is not a hyped language, we're past that cycle, some critical and widely used software are built in Go, millions of people rely on it.

Go tooling was relatively very good a decade ago but other languages have improved a lot since then, significantly because of its influence, and it's now about average. It's still better than python, and C or C++ of course. But about even with typescript, ruby, shit even php and ocaml have nearly caught up with their tooling. Go's is significantly worse than rust god help us and elixir has always made good excellent here.

I wouldn't call its tooling "a mess" but these days it's nothing notable either.

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

#39

Post by danielvaughn »

markusw wrote: post #21
DarkNova6 wrote: post #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…

I wasn't aiming for that. My point is more: I know Go already, it's good enough for my purposes, so I'm using that as my hammer. I could just as well have been Java or C# I learned eight years ago and used that for everything. :)

I just began using Go literally 2 days ago, but I could already see building most of my projects in it from here on out. It has the type system I'd need from Java or C#, while being almost as simple and readable as Python. I love the module system so far and enjoy not having to decide on my own formatter.

Go is perfectly boring and simple, and seems to get out of my way. At least, that's how it feels as a newcomer. I'm sure it will change over time, but I'm having a blast at the moment.

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

#40

Post by jimbokun »

None of these reasons are specific to Go. They apply just as well to any Turing complete programming language.

Not to say the arguments are bad. Just that the argument is for picking one tool and using it for everything to benefit from your investment in that tool across all your projects.

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