Go is my hammer, and everything is a nail • Hacker News Board

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

#91

Post by jimbokun » Mon, Aug 12, 2024, 2:29 PM UTC

giraffe_lady wrote: post #38

Thaxll wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Go was explicitly designed for fast compile times, especially compared to C++, and I haven't heard anything to suggest that's no longer the case. It was also designed as a more modern and mature replacement for C, and I can't think of many application domains where C is still the better choice.

Python is at such a different point in the design space I don't think you can really compare the two. Same with PHP, Ruby, Javascript etc.

For OCaml, need to decide how strongly you want to commit yourself to functional programming. Also, didn't OCaml have weak support for concurrency? Has that changed recently?

Similarly with Rust, comes down how much you want to commit yourself to learning and conforming to the borrow checker.

Elixir is an interesting comparison, as it's another language that allows you to build highly concurrent back end services. The tradeoffs are that Elixir provides even more robust scaling due to the Erlang VM. But Go allows you to more easily understand and optimize the memory and CPU performance of your application.

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

#92

Post by deergomoo » Mon, Aug 12, 2024, 2:30 PM UTC

There are a lot of aspects of Go that I’m really not a fan of, but I’ve been writing an increasing amount of it over the last few months and on the whole I’m finding it really enjoyable—even though I’m not sure I could empirically explain why.

The tooling is heaven compared to other stuff we do a lot of at work (TS/JS of course being the main offender), and generally I find I spend less time thinking about things that aren’t directly related to the problem I’m trying to solve. Though, that might just be because I’m not an expert and simply don’t yet know about other things I could be thinking about!

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

#93

Post by kamaal » Mon, Aug 12, 2024, 2:31 PM UTC

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #68

kamaal wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about the absence of exception handling? Plus OO has its own advantages, even if you don't use it all that much, its one of the best ways to fit problems into neat design patterns. Go seems to be missing those features.

? It doesn't have exceptions, so it doesn't need exception handling. It has an error system / standard that isn't based on exceptions. I only know exceptions from Java myself, and in practice, what it calls exceptions are often... well, not exceptions at all. Files missing, SQL queries returning no errors, division by zero are not exceptional situations, but normal day to day events. And an exception generates a stac…

The whole idea of exception handling with try/catch comes from the fact that problems and error handling can all be standardised into one structure of patterns. Once you are here you can be sure the language(compiler) and tooling(IDE/Editor etc) will generate them for you and provide you with means to handle them.

Nothing much has changed in terms of problems and interfaces. So the errors will remain the same.

Now when you use go, you will have to write a lot of code that other wise the language+tooling could do automatically for you. This is just doing work that you shouldn't even be doing the first place and pointless verbosity.

Minimal is not always better. And some parts just feel like they were omitted because the language designer didn't want to do the work for you. Whereas the whole point of a programming language is that it does as much work for you as it possibly can and make it easier for you.

Just saying writing the same/similar code over and over again is waste work.

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

#94

Post by bborud » Mon, Aug 12, 2024, 2:31 PM UTC

People always under-estimate the cost of properly learning a language. At any given time I tend to have a "main go-to language". I typically spend 2-4 years getting to the point where I can say I "know" a language. Then I try to stick to it long enough for the investment to pay off. Usually 8-10 years.

A surprising number of people think this is a very long time. It isn't. This is typically the time it takes to understand enough of the language, the compiler, the runtime, the standard library, and idiomatic ways to do things. It is the time it takes to where you can start to meaningfully contribute to evolving how the language is used and meaningfully coach architects, programmers and system designers. It is also what you need to absorb novices into the organization and train them fast.

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

#95

Post by kaba0 » Mon, Aug 12, 2024, 2:32 PM UTC

daghamm wrote: post #47

The author lists multiple reasons for this, but for me the biggest one is the first one: Go is good for almost everything . I have extremely good productivity when using Go. Once your project exceeds 100 lines it is usually even better than python. And yes, I am aware that Rustians did a survey where Rust was crowned as the most efficient language but in my reality (which may differ from yours) Go is simply the best…

How is it different than, say, java for this generalist purpose?

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

#96

Post by igtztorrero » Mon, Aug 12, 2024, 2:32 PM UTC

I love Golang, I used for backend, have some GUI apps but I think GUI packages and frameworks for Go are still immature, none of them convince me.

I would like a tool in go, that could handle nice GUI, compiled for WASM and run in the browser. Any ideas?

I will follow you @markuwsw.

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

#97

Post by jimbokun » Mon, Aug 12, 2024, 2:33 PM UTC

fifilura wrote: post #71

Where I feel go is lacking is for data wrangling. Group by, filter, map, join. It is just very error prone, inconvenient and slow to implement with for loops.

With generics you can now write all of those in Go.

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

#98

Post by jimbokun » Mon, Aug 12, 2024, 2:33 PM UTC

nj5rq wrote: post #34

> all popular programming languages can do basically anything That's just very not true...

It's true in terms of Turing Completeness.

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

#99

Post by kaba0 » Mon, Aug 12, 2024, 2:34 PM UTC

gnfargbl wrote: post #82

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 feels extremely strange to see Go described as a "hype" language. It was somewhat hyped around seven years ago, which is when I started using it almost exclusively. Before that, it had a strong hype peak about fourteen or fifteen years ago, just after it was born. However, it's not a young language any more. At this point I would actually submit the opposite criticism: it is a mature language which is perhaps star…

Count the number of posts with Go in the title, vs any other programming language. It easily beats out everything both here and on lobsters.

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

#100

Post by ManBeardPc » Mon, Aug 12, 2024, 2:34 PM UTC

Go is my favorite general-purpose tool (combination of language + standard library + 3rd party libraries + tooling + documentation). Everything just works out of the box and is simple to use and understand. No collection of dozens of external tools with fiddly configuration, a simple command to compile and simple deployment via a single executable with no additional setup required. No other language gives me such a simple and hassle-free all-around experience.

I certainly think other languages (Java, C#, Rust, JS/TS) have a lot of advantages over Go in some areas, but everything I've worked with so far has some other aspects that I absolutely hate.

POV from a (mainly) B2B fullstack SE