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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

#111

Post by kaba0 »

jimbokun wrote: post #77
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…

Faster on what axis? Go has maybe the fastest compile times, for example. Which is very important when you are iterating on a project. What do you dislike about the tool chain? Seems better than most languages to me.

Java’s toolchain may leave some to be desired in ergonomics, but compile time is just as fast if not faster.

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

#112

Post by aeyes »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #90
hk1337 wrote: post #27

This is the same thing everyone says about PHP, negatively. Don't make Go the next PHP. PHP has some good updates recently but it still has some people with a negative experience with it.

PHP fell foul of adopting other languages' features to try and make itself more popular though (OOP, typing, err... I don't know PHP anymore), Go is actively resistant to it. Or, resistant as in, "sell it to us" where it's a really hard sell to add something to the language that can already be done in a different way. The error handling debate from a few years ago was great, a few really well thought-out proposals we…

You don't have to use all these new fancy PHP features as long as you don't use any third party libraries. I still write PHP just like I did in 2002 and it works.

It's not as pedantic as Python which makes it pretty useful for small data manipulation tasks which I have to do every now and then.

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

#113

Post by ziml77 »

markusw wrote: post #83
nerdponx wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I would say there are many, many other ways to broaden my perspective, not just learning and using a different programming language. There are so many things to learn! (And I don't necessarily suggest not learning different languages, if one fancies that. I just don't use any other ones at the moment.)

I actually find it a bit of a curse to know too many languages. Because settling on one for any given project becomes very difficult. Like you start coding it up and then hit some friction and start thinking about one of the other languages you know that would be more elegant. Or you might have chosen a language that does a lot of things elegantly but then start thinking of the performance you've given up performance for that. Swapping languages will never stop those thoughts because there's always tradeoffs somewhere.

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

#114

Post by zarzavat »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #81
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.

Go does support functional programming constructs (as it has first-class functions) and there are some FP libraries out there, but they are discouraged because the execution is so much slower; Go is not optimized for FP, and chooses "clumsy" for loops over clever functional programming because the loops have mechanical sympathy and are simply faster in execution speed. That said, if you have a use case with a lot of…

Perhaps I’m thick but what kind of programming doesn’t involve data wrangling?

What are Go programmers doing that they don’t feel the need for map/filter/etc?

BTW there’s no reason why map and filter would be slower than loops, efficiently lowering such functions to loops was solved a very long time ago.

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

#115

Post by neonsunset »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #81
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.

Go does support functional programming constructs (as it has first-class functions) and there are some FP libraries out there, but they are discouraged because the execution is so much slower; Go is not optimized for FP, and chooses "clumsy" for loops over clever functional programming because the loops have mechanical sympathy and are simply faster in execution speed. That said, if you have a use case with a lot of…

> Go is not optimized for FP, and chooses "clumsy" for loops over clever functional programming because the loops have mechanical sympathy and are simply faster in execution speed.

So are iterators in Rust which allow you to write idiomatic iterator experessions. Hell, even LINQ in C# has improved dramatically and now makes sense in general purpose code where you would have erred on the side of caution previously. You can pry ‘var arr = nums.Select(int.Parse).ToArray();’ from my cold dead hands.

At the end of the day, it is about having capable compiler that can deal with the kind of complexity compiling iterator expressions optimally brings.

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

#116

Post by anonzzzies »

I find Go akin to C ; it's really fast to pick up, I can use it without internet if I have to, it has enough functionality and enough stable libraries for me not really to have to bother with the latest and the greatest of everything like in the javascript world.

I use it when I cannot use CL (for basically everything) or Racket (language / code generation), which basically means 'if my clients doesn't accept the above'.

For web/desktop/backend CL and Go are both incredibly productive. CL for me is more productive, mostly because the effortless starting, far more expressive (do a lot with very little code), better repl, debugging, save and die etc. Single binaries are great about both and so is lightning fast compilation.

I guess I have two hammers; one of them has a more comfortable handle for whacking in those slightly more difficult nails.

Lately I cheat by using a subset of CL and generating the Go code.

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

#117

Post by lawgimenez »

bborud wrote: post #17
lawgimenez wrote: post #3

I 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…

I mostly work on Swift and macOS, so SwiftUI.

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

#118

Post by bborud »

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 think the hype has already peaked for Go. When we switched to Go 8-9 years ago I already felt the hype had died down. We were late to the party. And I saw that as a good thing. To me it suggested Go was going to stick around.

And now, almost a decade later, we're still using it.

Note that at my company, we're a bunch of grumpy old guys with about 30 years of experience each. If you dangle a new and shiny language in front of us, our default instinct is to tell people to get lost. We don't do "fashionable". We tend to make investments in learning languages that we expect to get at least a decade out of.

And I don't think Go is succeeding Rust. From what I can tell, people are going in both directions.

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

#119

Post by Spartan-S63 »

lairv wrote: post #105

Go 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 per…

I agree with this take. I find Rust a more exciting language from a personal project perspective—and it's what I go with even when it doesn't make 100% sense.

Go is fine, though, and works well in a team environment. It's just clunky, but clunky in a productive way.

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

#120

Post by conor- »

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…

Go is the only language I've ever felt highly productive working in. Oftentimes in other stacks I find myself in analysis paralysis on meta things that don't matter:

- what design patterns/language features make sense to use

- what is the best lib to accomplish X

- how do you keep things up to date

With Go, the language is so simple that it's pretty difficult to over engineer or write terse code. Everything you need is in stdlib. The tooling makes dependency management and upgrades trivial because of strong backwards compatibility.

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