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Go is my hammer, and everything is a nail

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

#201

Post by neonsunset »

conor- wrote: post #136
kaba0 wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

As someone who isn't super proficient in Java I usually find Java daunting to get started with full of buckets of "meta" issues like in my other comment. What JVM do I use? Does it matter? Does it matter what version I install, what if I have to install/manage multiple versions? If I want to write a web service can I use vanilla Java stdlib or do I have to use Spring or some framework? If I use Spring, do I have to g…

I think it's good that Go, among other well-made toolchains, brought attention to importance of good CLI UX.

But it's not something that is unique to Go:

    dotnet new web
    dotnet run
    curl localhost:5050
also 'dotnet watch' for hot-reload.

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

#202

Post by neonsunset »

thornewolf wrote: post #161
maccard wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would rather go had real enums, and I would _prefer_ if there were sum types. I agree it's more verbose, but I don't find that that verbosity really bothers me most of the time. Is res= [x for x in foo if "banned" in x] really actually more readable than var result []string for _, x := range foo { if strings.Contains(x, "banned") { result = append(result, x) } } ? I know it's 6 lines vs 1, but in practice I look at…

I argue: - The list comprehension is ever slightly more readable. (Small Positive) - It is a bit faster to write the code for the Python variant. (Small Positive) So this would be a small positive when using Python. Furthermore, I believe there is this "small positive" trade-off on nearly every aspect of Python, when compared to Go. It makes me wonder why someone might prefer Go to Python in almost any context. Some…

Rust:

    let results = foo
        .into_iter()
        .filter(|s| s.contains("banned"))
        .collect::>();
C#:

    var results = foo
        .Where(s => s.Contains("banned"))
        .ToArray();
Convenient, easy to understand and fast.

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

#203

Post by [deleted] »

mapcars wrote: post #151
conor- wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I do programming interviews and I found candidates struggling a lot in doing http request and parsing response json in Go while in Python its a breeze, what makes it particularly hard, is it lack of generics or dict data type?

[deleted]

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

#204

Post by cy_hauser »

daghamm wrote: post #75
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…

How can you call Go hype driven? It was literally designed to be "boring".

I think it was the Go Marketing Team who decided to call it a boring language. "Boring" tested well for hyping the language.

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

#205

Post by bitbasher »

Life is barely long enough to get good at one thing so you should choose your thing wisely. That's wisdom I've held for quite some time.

Coincidentally, I chose Go as my language of choice as well. The factors that led me to that choice were many, but to highlight some:

- incredible standard library

- simple to read and write

- single static binary builds (assets included, like html/images, etc)

- don't need a container (my binary is the container)

- can be used anywhere (webdev, desktop apps, gamedev, embedded, etc)

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

#206

Post by maccard »

neonsunset wrote: post #202
thornewolf wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I argue: - The list comprehension is ever slightly more readable. (Small Positive) - It is a bit faster to write the code for the Python variant. (Small Positive) So this would be a small positive when using Python. Furthermore, I believe there is this "small positive" trade-off on nearly every aspect of Python, when compared to Go. It makes me wonder why someone might prefer Go to Python in almost any context. Some…

Rust: let results = foo .into_iter() .filter(|s| s.contains("banned")) .collect:: >(); C#: var results = foo .Where(s => s.Contains("banned")) .ToArray(); Convenient, easy to understand and fast.

I think Rusts terseness shows here - I think C#'s approach is the best. Also, if you don't use `.ToArray()`, you still have an IEnumerable which is very usable.

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

#207

Post by randomdata »

markusw wrote: post #195
omeid2 wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I don't understand. How can it be an illusion of productivity when it actually produces something that's very easy to see?

He is saying what is very easy to see in certain contexts is not transferrable to the abstract. Go can be shockingly productive at certain tasks, but it also falls flat on its face at others. If you take your limited experience with Go (or whatever; this applies to all tools) where you found it to be highly productive and then conclude that it is always productive and therefore a tool you can use in all situations, you are bound to encounter negative productivity when you have a different problem to solve.

Need to write, say, a network service? Go can no doubt give just about anything else a productivity run for their money. Need to solve a machine learning problem? ... Good luck. It can be done, of course, but you're quite likely in for a whole lot of extra work not needed in other ecosystems, destroying any semblance of productivity.

In other words, the comment is a thinly veiled "use the right tool for the job".

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

#208

Post by badrequest »

mapcars wrote: post #151
conor- wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I do programming interviews and I found candidates struggling a lot in doing http request and parsing response json in Go while in Python its a breeze, what makes it particularly hard, is it lack of generics or dict data type?

I think other languages cause folks to understand JSON responses as a big bag of keys and values, which have many convenient ways of being represented in those languages. When you get to Go and you want to parse a JSON response, it has to be a well-defined thing that you understand ahead of time, but I also think you adapt when doing this more than once in Go.

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

#209

Post by gavindean90 »

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…

Honestly it gave me the feeling of not arguing to use Go but instead arguing to use the full featured language you know the best. The caveat being that it is of you are a single developer making all the decisions and writing all the code. Seemed to make a good case for that

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

#210

Post by nerdponx »

lantry wrote: post #129
kaba0 wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

IME, there are two main differences between go and java: 1) go is more "batteries included". Modules, linting, testing, and much more are all part of the standard cli. Also, the go stdlib has a ton of stuff; in java, there is almost always a well-built third party library, but that requires you to find and learn more things instead of just reaching for stdlib every time. 2) golang is "newer" and "more refined". this…

There are surprisingly few languages in this category, especially if you limit consideration to statically typed. Go, C#, Swift? Nim, Crystal? F#? Kotlin?

Go is not my favorite language, but it really is exceptional in terms of its effective utilitarian design.

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