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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

#221

Post by jay_kyburz »

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?

Hold on, did you just say Go doesn't have a Dictionary data type?

I'm a Javascript, Lua, Python, and C# guy and Dict is my whole world.

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

#222

Post by icholy »

cybrexalpha wrote: post #186
icholy wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure what you're comparing to, but Go modules are probably the best dependency management system in any language.

It does a lot well. For example it correctly pins dependencies by hash in go.sum. It's by no means the worst dependency management system I've ever used. IMO the biggest miss with Go modules is conflating the identity of a dependency with how you get it. This means that renaming a repo not only breaks the module itself (as you self-import other modules in the same source tree using the full path), but all of your dep…

> But ultimately a real fix involves touching every single file that imports your dependency.

Why is that a problem?

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

#224

Post by ljm »

badrequest wrote: post #208
mapcars wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If I had one complaint, it’s the use of ‘tags’ to configure how json is handled on a struct, such that it basically becomes part of the struct’s type. It can lead to a fair bit of duplication of structs whose only difference is the json handling, or otherwise a lot of boilerplate code with custom marshal/unmarshal methods. In some cases the advice is even to do parse the json into a map, do the conversion, and then serialise it again!

The case I ran into is where one API returned camelCase json but we wanted snake_case instead. Had to basically create another struct type with different json tags, rather than having something like decoders and encoders that can configure the output.

I like Go and a lot of the decisions it makes, but it has its fair share of pain points because of early decisions made in its design that results in repetitive and overly imperative code, and while that does help create code that is clear and comprehensible (mostly), it can distract attention away from the intended behaviour of the code.

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

#225

Post by bitwize »

jay_kyburz wrote: post #221
mapcars wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Hold on, did you just say Go doesn't have a Dictionary data type? I'm a Javascript, Lua, Python, and C# guy and Dict is my whole world.

Go has had a dict-like data type from the jump; they're called "maps" in Go.

Some of early Go's design decisions were kinda stupid, but they didn't screw that one up.

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

#226

Post by AmpsterMan »

jay_kyburz wrote: post #221
mapcars wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Hold on, did you just say Go doesn't have a Dictionary data type? I'm a Javascript, Lua, Python, and C# guy and Dict is my whole world.

It does. https://go.dev/blog/maps

What the poster was alluding to is that you usually prefer to deseialize to a struct rather than a record/dict/map

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

#227

Post by zhengyi13 »

jay_kyburz wrote: post #221
mapcars wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Hold on, did you just say Go doesn't have a Dictionary data type? I'm a Javascript, Lua, Python, and C# guy and Dict is my whole world.

Not a programmer, so this is every programmer's chance to hammer me on correctness.

No, Go doesn't have a type named Dict, or Hash (my Perl is leaking), or whatever.

It does have a map type[1], where you can define your keys as one type, and your values of another type, and that pretty closely approximates Dicts in other languages, I think.

[1]: https://go.dev/blog/maps

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

#228

Post by xyproto »

jayd16 wrote: post #214
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…

I'm asking this earnestly but is Go suitable for native GUI apps (not web)? 3D graphics/Games? Audio processing?

Yes, because one can either turn off the GC, allocate memory up front (arena style), or call C or Assembly from Go.

The performance is likely to be good enough with GC turned on, though, because it is unusually fast.

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

#229

Post by gcau »

blt wrote: post #216

I really like most aspects of Go, but as someone who writes a lot of numerical code, no operator overloading is a deal breaker. It's so hard to accept something like Add(Scale(s1, vec1), Scale(s2, vec2)) over s1 * vec1 + s2 * vec2. So I stick with Python and C++ for now. Rust is really appealing as a C++ replacement, but it has too many rules to replace Python for one-off scripts. Still need to try Nim and Swift, I g…

Is this something Go intentionally didn't add?

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

#230

Post by [deleted] »

jay_kyburz wrote: post #221
mapcars wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Hold on, did you just say Go doesn't have a Dictionary data type? I'm a Javascript, Lua, Python, and C# guy and Dict is my whole world.

[deleted]
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