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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

#461

Post by dsfasfd »

abtinf wrote: post #294
gcau wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this something Go intentionally didn't add?

Operator overloading essentially makes code unreadable without deep diving past the interface boundary. In Go, you can generally look at any snippet of code and know precisely what it does.

Not having operator overload making the code more readable is the same argument that was brought up with generics and it is still false.

Go does have operator overloading, for example + is overloaded for float.., int.. and even non numeric types like string.

And it does so for a very good reason: having operator overloading makes code much more readable when used correctly. It's just that the language designers didn't trust their users.

As long as you know the types of x and y you always know precisely what x + y does, same as you know what x.Add(y) does. There's no difference.

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

#462

Post by afiodorov »

I used to work for a Go shop. We dealt with financial data. I found it so annoying that many of my colleagues would use Go for one-off tasks such as aggregating CSV files, updating the database with some data, or fetching data from the database, and then trying to make a plot. I saw my colleagues again and again implementing basic algorithms such as rolling median, or finding a maximum. Instead of loading data into Pandas and doing a group by, they would create some kind of loopy solution that would use maps.

I totally understand why some people prefer Go in production to Python, but I could never understand why people wouldn't just learn the standard data science tools instead of reinventing the wheel in Go, always debugging their own off-by-one errors. It was difficult for me to trust the results of such analyses, given that I knew how many of the basic functions were written on the fly and probably not even tested.

In the end, I didn't think it was a good use of the company's time. It felt more like an ego thing - thinking and showing that Go is sufficient. It reminds me of how people try to use iPads to code - only to show that they can do it.

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

#463

Post by DarkNova6 »

radicalbyte wrote: post #443
bb88 wrote: post #377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

2012: Python is Awesome! 2014: Python is a great language, but there are a few pitfalls 2016: Python is a good language with the right IDE, tooling, and process. The people are pretty cool though. 2018: I like python, but I wish more people used type annotations. 2020: You know, metaclasses are freaking awesome! They saved me so much work! 2022: Why can't people code the most obvious solution in python? 2024: Celery!…

I have a nice way of testing a language - I download a couple of projects written by beginner / mid-level developers and not having commercial dependencies and see how much effort it takes to get them running. Python is one of the worst performers (and Java is shockingly bad too, although a lot of that is down to the way the JVM/language have been mismanaged). At least unless you're comparing it to very low-level lan…

In which way do you believe the JVM/language has been mismanaged?

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

#464

Post by GaryNumanVevo »

RandomThoughts3 wrote: post #452
kerkeslager wrote: post #379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you want to progress your career you'll need to take on hard problems at some point. Go isn't particularly unique in excelling at easy problems.

Go doesn't excel at easy problems. Go is fine at pretty much everything. Do you think Kubernetes is an easy problem? The thing is just that Go is very opiniated in its feature set. That's you see people here writing about complex projects using "wild" or even "god awful" things, and lament the inability to properly map API boundaries in the language. The truth is obviously that all of these is not particularly wild.…

Go is "opinionated" because it's designed to be simple rather than complete.

- Why are lower cased symbols not exported? Because it would be too complicated to add private / public keywords.

- Why isn't there exception handling? It's too complicated. It's simpler to just have everyone manually handle exception flow.

- Why isn't there an optional type? It's too complicated. Just use a nil pointer and or default values.

- Why aren't there sets or other rich datatypes in the stdlib? It's too complicated. Now go and write it yourself or download a microlibrary.

- Why are there no nil pointer protections? It's too complicated.

It's very easy to buy into the Golang PR and say "well it's just opinionated" as opposed to calling it "simplistic" or "incomplete". It's an okay language, I've written a lot of complicated stuff in it over the last 6 or so years, including a distributed KV database. Eventually you WILL hit the limits of "opinionated" design.

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

#465

Post by munksbeer »

radicalbyte wrote: post #443
bb88 wrote: post #377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

2012: Python is Awesome! 2014: Python is a great language, but there are a few pitfalls 2016: Python is a good language with the right IDE, tooling, and process. The people are pretty cool though. 2018: I like python, but I wish more people used type annotations. 2020: You know, metaclasses are freaking awesome! They saved me so much work! 2022: Why can't people code the most obvious solution in python? 2024: Celery!…

I have a nice way of testing a language - I download a couple of projects written by beginner / mid-level developers and not having commercial dependencies and see how much effort it takes to get them running. Python is one of the worst performers (and Java is shockingly bad too, although a lot of that is down to the way the JVM/language have been mismanaged). At least unless you're comparing it to very low-level lan…

> and Java is shockingly bad too, although a lot of that is down to the way the JVM/language have been mismanaged

This is interesting and not what I would expect. Generally to get a java app running from github you'd install the correct JDK and that should be about it. Many projects will use maven, which will know how to obtain dependencies. Could you describe a typical issue?

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

#467

Post by sgt »

bb88 wrote: post #377
saghm wrote: post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 a…

2012: Python is Awesome! 2014: Python is a great language, but there are a few pitfalls 2016: Python is a good language with the right IDE, tooling, and process. The people are pretty cool though. 2018: I like python, but I wish more people used type annotations. 2020: You know, metaclasses are freaking awesome! They saved me so much work! 2022: Why can't people code the most obvious solution in python? 2024: Celery!…

What's so bad about Celery?

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

#469

Post by quectophoton »

radicalbyte wrote: post #443
bb88 wrote: post #377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

2012: Python is Awesome! 2014: Python is a great language, but there are a few pitfalls 2016: Python is a good language with the right IDE, tooling, and process. The people are pretty cool though. 2018: I like python, but I wish more people used type annotations. 2020: You know, metaclasses are freaking awesome! They saved me so much work! 2022: Why can't people code the most obvious solution in python? 2024: Celery!…

I have a nice way of testing a language - I download a couple of projects written by beginner / mid-level developers and not having commercial dependencies and see how much effort it takes to get them running. Python is one of the worst performers (and Java is shockingly bad too, although a lot of that is down to the way the JVM/language have been mismanaged). At least unless you're comparing it to very low-level lan…

My usual test for choosing a new programming language, is to see how easy or difficult it is to read documentation without having to open a web browser.

For languages/tools/frameworks/whatever that I'm already using, the main way I compare between them is looking at the ratio of "problems I was able to solve from their official documentation" vs "problems where I needed to use random blog posts (or worse, Stack Overflow) to find the solution".

Makes it a lot easier for me to choose tech for my hobby projects, where I sometimes don't even touch projects for several years because stuff just runs smoothly.

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

#470

Post by jalopy »

brightball wrote: post #321
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…

This is actually how I feel about Ruby. Not full on Rails because there is a lot more to learn there which comes with the time investment (which is also worth it in many cases). But for most scripting work especially, just raw Ruby and maybe the Sequel library for a database just makes my productivity soar.

Do you have any open source examples (either your own or others) of simple Ruby + Sequel that are particularly elegant + productive that you could point to? Would love to see this.

I agree Ruby is the most elegant and enjoyable language to develop in.

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