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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

#361

Post by [deleted] »

christophilus wrote: post #352
sedatk wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I chose C# for the same reasons. It's probably easier to make C# unreadable than Go due to plethora of features, but it all comes down to how you discipline yourself about writing code.

My main beef with C# was the culture. I spent around 15 years building stuff in C# (since 1.0), and absolutely loved the language. But, man. The Microsoft shops were so full of Kool-Aid drinkers, and there was so much enterprisey crap that often came along with that. I miss C#, but I don't miss the culture.

[deleted]

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

#362

Post by marcus_holmes »

absoflutely wrote: post #233
jay_kyburz wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 maps, json parsing and http built in. I'm not exactly sure what this person is referring to. Perhaps they are mostly interviewing beginners?

Go maps have a defined type (like map[string]string), so you can only put values of that type in them. A JSON object with (e.g) numbers in it will fail if you try and parse that into a map of strings.

As others have said, the issue with Go parsing JSON is that Go doesn't handle unstructured data at all well, and most other languages consider JSON to be unstructured data. Go expects the JSON to be strongly typed and rigidly defined, mirroring a struct in the Go code that it can use as a receiver for the values.

There are techniques for handling this, but they're not obvious and usually learned by painful experience. This is not all Go's fault - there are too many endpoints out there that return wildly variable JSON depending on context.

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

#363

Post by nequo »

jimbokun wrote: post #91
giraffe_lady wrote: post #38

Earlier 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…

> Also, didn't OCaml have weak support for concurrency? Has that changed recently?

OCaml has had Lwt for concurrent IO for long enough that it is now being deprecated in favor of Eio[1]:

https://github.com/ocsigen/lwt

[1] https://github.com/ocaml-multicore/eio

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

#364

Post by saghm »

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 is the time it takes to where you can start to meaningfully contribute to evolving how the language is used and meaningfully coach architects, programmers and system designers. It is also what you need to absorb novices into the organization and train them fast.

I think these criteria in particular are much more than a lot of people mean when they say "learn a language", which would explain why their estimates are lower than yours. You're talking about expertise, whereas plenty of people are speaking of basic competency. This seems more like (natural) language semantics about what it means to "know" and the definition of "properly learn" than about the accuracy of people's estimates.

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

#366

Post by ramijames »

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…

I don't think it is that long. Think of learning any spoken language. We expect that it takes AT LEAST ten years to be able to master it, and typically it takes much longer to meaningfully add to the compendium of literature. Usually we are talking about decades. It isn't just about the tool (speaking, writing) but being so fluent that you can successfully express yourself in a way that has impact.

If you can do it in ten years with a software stack, I'd say that's pretty impressive.

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

#367

Post by otteromkram »

BiteCode_dev wrote: post #277
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…

And then you have the ever changing ecosystem, that can take years so sort out on it's own and must be constantly studied. E.G: if you arrive in Python right now, numpy is in version 2 and polars is stable. uv is all the rage, pydantic gained so much perf it's not even funny, toml is part of the stdlib and textual is looking very good. Type hints are much better than 2 years ago, htmx is used a lot in the web departm…

IMHO, that's not part of learning the language. You don't really even need half of the packages you mentioned unless you don't know the language and, instead, rely upon third-party crutches.

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

#369

Post by claytongulick »

marcus_holmes wrote: post #362
absoflutely wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Go has maps, json parsing and http built in. I'm not exactly sure what this person is referring to. Perhaps they are mostly interviewing beginners?

Go maps have a defined type (like map[string]string), so you can only put values of that type in them. A JSON object with (e.g) numbers in it will fail if you try and parse that into a map of strings. As others have said, the issue with Go parsing JSON is that Go doesn't handle unstructured data at all well, and most other languages consider JSON to be unstructured data. Go expects the JSON to be strongly typed and r…

I feel like good JSON handling is sort of table stakes for any language for me these days.

The pain of dealing with JSON in Go is one of the primary reasons I stick mostly with nodejs for my api servers.

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

#370

Post by drdaeman »

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 can totally agree that Go is good enough for most projects, to the extent it's a go-to choice for many. However, it's not always the best tool - frequently it wins just because it allows to prototype quicker. YMMV, but for me, it's not a love relationship, it's a love-hate relationship.

> The language is extremely simple.

Simplicity is a double-edged sword. It didn't even have basic generics for a long while, and it's painful to remember how bad it was without them. Still doesn't have a lot of stuff anyone would expect from a modern language.

> If you know 20% of C you are already a Go expert.

Strong disagree. Knowing $language means knowing the patterns and caveats and (sorry for a cliche term, I'm not fond of it, but I don't have a better term so I hope you get the meaning) "best practices". Those are drastically different between C and Go. Especially when it comes to concurrency and parallelism.

> The toolchain and the core libraries alone can do 90% of what most people will ever need.

This is provably false. Virtually every serious project out there pulls a ton of dependencies, like database drivers, configuration toolkits, tracing and logging libraries and so on. Heck, I think a lot of shops have project templates for this reason - to standardize on the layout and pull the company-preferred set of libraries for common stuff. Core libraries are slowly getting there but so far they don't have very basic stuff like MapSet[T] or JSON codecs for nullable types like sql.NullString, so you gotta pull third-party stuff.

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