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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

#251

Post by Klonoar »

bborud wrote: post #94

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 under…

It’s not just the time to understand those nuances, but to keep up with the pace of changes. There’s an aspect of navigating those in some languages (JS…) that can be time consuming depending on where it’s deployed.

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

#252

Post by jmull »

> But why? When the common wisdom is to always take the problem at hand, analyze it, and then choose the tools, why would I ignore that and go

Sounds like they are choosing the right tool for the job.

When considering languages, familiarity is a significant aspect. And, the smaller the duration/size of the project, the more significant it is. A decent analysis wouldn't ignore this.

If the language you're most productive with is appropriate for a project (and go is appropriate for a wide variety of things), you need a good reason not to use it.

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

#253

Post by amedvednikov »

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…

[flagged]

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

#254

Post by 0cf8612b2e1e »

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?

People write games and GUI apps in Python, so why not?

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

#255

Post by IshKebab »

amedvednikov wrote: post #253
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…

[flagged]

Gotta admire the craziness of sticking with a language and apparently even building a community of fans even after such an insanely panned debut. I wonder if this will be the No Man's Sky of languages. Does it actually work yet?

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

#256

Post by skitter »

maccard wrote: post #127
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 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 agree that list comprehensions aren't any easier to read. A proper streaming interface on the other hand lets you easily follow how the data is transformed:

    foo
      .stream()
      .filter(x -> x.contains("banned"))
      .collect(Collectors.toList());
As an aside, Go conflating lists and views irks me, in part due to what weird semantics it gives to append (e.g. if you have two disjunct slices and append an element to one slice, that might modify the other slice).

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

#257

Post by [deleted] »

ziml77 wrote: post #113
markusw wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

[deleted]

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

#258

Post by api »

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 has very little story when it comes to desktop or mobile GUI apps, which is too bad because it would be a very productive language for that kind of thing.

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

#260

Post by w10-1 »

Granting the indie-dev, limited resources, focus-is-good, to me the key is enablement by available libraries, platforms, IDE's, language survival and importance, etc. -- none of which the author mentions.

Java for the most part has libraries and IDE's due to its history, but got tripped up on the essential web platform story: it's only achingly small/fast enough for real servers, and just flat out gave up on the browser after the javascript onslaught. For future-proofing, anti-Oracle bias has hamstrung Java of late (notwithstanding the excellent upgrades and engineering Oracle put in).

Go is great if you're on the server side with Google-like concerns, and it's unlikely Google would ever drop Go.

With Rust, the language offers the most for serious systems programming, but the learning curve limits available libraries (converse being true in javascript land). Rust is still early-adopters - likely the best talent-wise, but not scaling.

Swift is interesting. Can be as easy as Java, but is becoming as correct as Rust wrt lifetimes and more deployable than Go, to both server and embedded. But no real incentive from Apple for deploying on Windows or to the web, so that's handled by a few heroes. And unfortunately, libraries are sort of an open-source zoo of minor offerings. But Apple's betting the company on Swift, so you can, too.

Python pretty much lucked into popularity by supporting the scientific computing that would become data analysis and AI after building significant community inertia. It's sort of the default prototyping language in a time when prototypes are often good enough. It's gradually been adding typing and performance to stay good enough.

So Python would be my recommendation as the one language to rule them all for indie developers, who are more likely to be plumbing together applications than writing database engines. It's also where the money is now for most developers.

That said, it may depend most on the market for skills. It might be easier to build an indie business as a Go developer because the supply/demand curve favors you. And as far as I know, there's no good data on point for that.

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