"The world is laaaarge. The number of projects are basically infinite. Even if I carve out a tiny subset of infinite, that’s still infinite." I liked the use of this wisdom in there.
Thanks! I guess I have moments of insight sometimes. :D
Go is my hammer, and everything is a nail
101–110 of 816 posts
Re: Go is my hammer, and everything is a nail
#102The 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…
Yeah, this. It's just good enough for 95% of use-cases, while being very productive.
Personally, one of the biggest selling points for me is that imo modelling concurrency and asynchronicity via fibers (goroutines), rather than async/await, is just a ton easier and faster to work with. Again, there are use-cases for the alternative (mainly performance, or if you like to express everything in your type-system) but it's just great for 95% of use-cases.
Re: Go is my hammer, and everything is a nail
#103At the peak of my honeymoon phase with Golang, I went down this path too, and oh boy does it feels great and liberating, like finding a magic bullet, but soon as you start to scratch beyond the surface and dig deeper, you will find yourself trying to screw screws with a hammer, or tie your shoes with a chainsaw and ungodly things like that. No tool deserves more love or loyalty than the productivity it brings, anythi…
It's not really about Go, I think. But it makes me productive, and I like that. I don't think it's a magic bullet at all. Lots of things annoy me about it. But it's _good enough_ for quite a lot of things IMO. But tying shoes with a chainsaw does sound kinda fun. :D
I completely understand, but the productivity is superficial in my opinion, once you need to dig your teeth deeper into anything not "cloud" and "system engineering" with Go, overall productivity plummets hard.
This is from some 10 years of Go experience. But like you say, it is not really about Go; my point is about the illusion of productivity that familiarity brings; it is very deceptive and hurts productivity in the long term.
Re: Go is my hammer, and everything is a nail
#104At the peak of my honeymoon phase with Golang, I went down this path too, and oh boy does it feels great and liberating, like finding a magic bullet, but soon as you start to scratch beyond the surface and dig deeper, you will find yourself trying to screw screws with a hammer, or tie your shoes with a chainsaw and ungodly things like that. No tool deserves more love or loyalty than the productivity it brings, anythi…
It's not really about Go, I think. But it makes me productive, and I like that. I don't think it's a magic bullet at all. Lots of things annoy me about it. But it's _good enough_ for quite a lot of things IMO. But tying shoes with a chainsaw does sound kinda fun. :D
If someone can't tie their shoes with a chainsaw, they just haven't dedicated appropriate time to their tools :)
Side note, this reminds me of a local YouTuber who mostly films himself using a chainsaw and has a remarkably large following (516k followers right now!). He also loves axes. I present to you Buckin' Billy Ray: https://www.youtube.com/@BuckinBillyRaySmith
I'm pretty sure this guy ties his shoes with a chain saw
Re: Go is my hammer, and everything is a nail
#105Go is everything I don’t want in a language for my personal projects. It’s verbose, every simple task feels like a lot to write. It’s not expressive, what would be a one-liner in Python makes you write three for loops in Go. I constantly need to find workarounds for the lack of proper enums, lack of sum types, no null safety etc.
I’m sure these are the exact reasons why Go is good for enterprise software, but for personal projects, I get no fun out of using it
Re: Go is my hammer, and everything is a nail
#106Earlier 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.
This is my first time working with a language that exclusively uses errors as values, and I haven't had time to develop any strong feelings about it. So far it feels nice because it makes error handling crystal clear, but I could also see it becoming cumbersome over time.
It’s the exact same broken system as has been known from C, it’s literally checking `errno` all the time.
Re: Go is my hammer, and everything is a nail
#107People 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 under…
Agreed. Having a passing knowledge of many languages is of course easy (even being moderately productive with them, esp. with Copilot now), but knowing the ins and outs of a language and its ecosystem is a very nontrivial time investment.
Thus, I'm mostly an anti-fan of the idea of polyglot environments.
Re: Go is my hammer, and everything is a nail
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
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, J…
> 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
Well, it’s quite easy to be fast if you are just spewing out barely optimized machine code. Compilers aren’t slow just for the sake of it.
Re: Go is my hammer, and everything is a nail
#109I wish Go had a decent UI framework though.
Can you give me an example of a decent UI framework? Or frameworks? (I'm not a GUI programmer, but I've been dabbling a bit using Fyne. I figured that in the C++/C# sphere UI frameworks especially on Windows were sorted out until I read an article by some frustrated individual who listed all the problems he has with various UI frameworks on Windows. So I realized that perhaps this isn't as well sorted as I thought. I…
> Can you give me an example of a decent UI framework? Or frameworks?
The obvious answer is Qt, but Qt can be a bit of a chore to get into. Same is true for GTK. In my opinion more accessible options would be Fyne or Gioui. All of them have good Go bindings and are suitable for "standard fare".
Re: Go is my hammer, and everything is a nail
#110This article is not so much about Go but about choosing to specialize in one language ecosystem instead of spreading one's attention across several.
I always wonder: why do some people like to do this (spreading)? I wonder the same about people who are "distro tourists". The latter tend to spend a lot of time on what seems like unproductive diddling (desktop skins, etc).