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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

#581

Post by aragilar »

theshrike79 wrote: post #521
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…

Very few languages are good at _everything_. But what I do 95% of the time is backend services with APIs and CLI tooling, for both it's amazing. For GUIs it's hit and miss. There are some attempts at tooling, but they all feel a bit off to me. But Rust the same issue, as does C#. We need a modern Visual Basic again =)

I think well-written and engineered Python can do this (given the scripting/easy to call other languages bit), but there are still going to be bits where you're going to be fighting uphill (whether that's because the area is actively pushing against their preferred option, or where a scripting tool is inappropriate).

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

#582

Post by entropyie »

derriz wrote: post #494
sph wrote: post #419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

2012: Python is Awesome! 2014: Python is a pain in the butt to manage packages and dependencies, how the hell am I gonna deploy this? It's still a mess 10 years later unless you live deep in the ecosystem and know what third-party solutions du jour to manage that complexity. At least we have Docker now. Also let's not forget the Python 3 migration fiasco that lasted ~2008-2018 and I still find myself porting librarie…

At least for Python dependency management, I'd hardly call it a mess these days and yes it was a horrible 10 years ago. The de-facto standard of venv and pip (using a requirements.txt file) is generally painless these days. To the extent that moving between MacOS, Linux and Windows is feasible for most (of my) Python work. And the Python 2/3 pain stopped being an issue a few years back. I haven't been forced because…

Eh, poetry, pipenv, conda, setup.py, GCC and all dev tools to possibly compile some C shite you didn't know you needed? It's a complete shit show still...

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

#583

Post by thrwaway1985882 »

derriz wrote: post #543
theshrike79 wrote: post #513

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It still won't beat the deployment speed of scp executable user@host:direc/tory/ that you get with Go. I still use python for stuff that never leaves my computer, but in most cases if I know I need to run it on Someone Else's Machine (or even a server of mine) I'll reach for Go instead.

Sure but that's not going to work across platforms, right? So not really an apples to apples comparison.

Even the most ardent of Go-haters have to be fair and admit it makes cross-compilation really nice.

    GOOS=linux GOARCH=amd64 go build && scp executable user@host:direc/tory/
Out of the box, no toolchains to manage.

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

#584

Post by aragilar »

bborud wrote: post #188
jerf wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Go and Node have some significant overlap, but Go and Rust are barely even competitors. Of course there's a lot of programs that you can use either to write. There's a lot of programs where it hardly even matters which language you pick at all because they're all perfectly acceptable solutions, though, so that really isn't saying much. But if you map languages out by the programs where language choice matters at leas…

> Go and Node have some significant overlap, but Go and Rust are > barely even competitors. Among the people I know Go and Rust seem to be at the top of their list. Almost all people I know who program Rust also know Go. Not as many Go programmers I know program in Rust as well, but some know Rust and even more want to learn it. Which probably isn't too peculiar because Rust is more of a kerfuffle to program in. I'm…

That likely suggests the people you know are working on a specific kind of project.

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

#585

Post by mrkeen »

kerkeslager wrote: post #378
RandomThoughts3 wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's why I love Go so much. You want to write a very clever library using elegant abstraction and generics to have a cool innovative interface to solve your problem? Tough luck, you can't. So instead, you will just have to write a bog standard implementation with for-loops and good old functions which you will have to copy and tweak as needed where you really need something more complicated. It will work perfectly…

"Simple" is a cop-out word. Things can be simple along a lot of vectors. The vector you've chosen seems to be "does less for you" which taken ad absurdum would have you using assembly. Go does have elegant abstractions, and they aren't the simplest along this vector, nor would anyone want them to be. Coroutines, for example, are actually quite conceptually complicated in some ways. I prefer "understandable"--it appea…

> Attacking Haskell is sort of a straw man--so far I haven't seen anyone in this thread propose Haskell as a go alternative. I think we agree Haskell is far too dogmatic about its abstractions when it's impractical to be used as a general-purpose language (because I don't think it's intended as a general-purpose language).

I'll be that guy. We like our stuff in Haskell. Watching the rest of the industry move forward is like a reverse trip around the Monopoly board of computer science progress.

When I joined up, everything was Java, which couldn't make a binary. Then the crowd jumped to JS, where we ditched integers and true parallelism. Python freed us from speed. Go came along, promising to remove generics and exceptions, and to finally give us back our boilerplate.

And whenever features progress in the forward direction again, there are two issues - firstly, they sometimes come out kind of crap. Secondly, arguments for or against this crapness tend to take up all the oxygen that could have facilitated discussions around goodness.

Exceptions or return values? Nope, monadic error handling, any day of the week.

Terse dynamic code, or bloated static code? Nope, terse code with full type inference.

Terse nulls or nulls & boilerplate Optionals? Nope, just terse Optionals.

First-order generics or no? Higher-kinded parametric polymorphism.

Multiprogramming via locking & shared memory or message passing? Hey how about I choose between shared-memory transactions or transactional message-passing instead?

There is little stuff happening outside of Haskell to be envious of. Java took a swing at the null problem with Optionals a decade ago. My IDE warns me not to use them. It's taking another swing with "Null-Restricted Value Class Types". I know your eyes glaze over when people rant about Haskell, but for two seconds, just picture yourself happily doing your day-to-day coding without the existence of nulls, and pretend you read a blog post about exciting new methods for detecting them.

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

#586

Post by HKH2 »

Spartan-S63 wrote: post #119
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 agree with this take. I find Rust a more exciting language from a personal project perspective—and it's what I go with even when it doesn't make 100% sense. Go is fine, though, and works well in a team environment. It's just clunky, but clunky in a productive way.

Rust-script + cmd_lib = scripting using shell, and converting it to Rust when I want performance.

I know it might sound dreadful but it works well for me, especially without an internet connection.

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

#587

Post by orthoxerox »

infecto wrote: post #575
classified wrote: post #537

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Instead of loading data into Pandas and doing a group by SQL can do `group by`. No need for overkill with "data science tools".

While definitely doable, using a SQL database to do data discovery is obtuse.

Not really. DuckDB can operate on raw csv without ingesting them. This is as easy if not easier than setting up python and pandas.

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

#588

Post by lnenad »

rkangel wrote: post #556
m_a_g wrote: post #540

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here is the thing: many software engineers don't need to learn a language "properly." When you start a new job, there will almost always be an existing code base, and you'll have to make contributions to it. Pattern recognition will get you a long way before you need to dive deep into the language internals.

This is true, and it makes the people who do actually know the language in depth extra valuable.

Only for situations where that knowledge is required.

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

#589

Post by lnenad »

sanderjd wrote: post #568
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…

It has not been my experience that Go is good for almost everything. On the contrary, it seems good at a couple very specific (though very common) niches: network services and cli utilities. But for most of what I do right now - data heavy work - it has not turned out to be very good (IMO). It really is just not better in any way to have to constantly write manual loops to do anything.

I agree with this, there is a reason Python is the king of data.

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

#590

Post by the_gipsy »

erik_seaberg wrote: post #274
duskwuff wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Like there's still no Set class map[T]struct{} ?

https://github.com/deckarep/golang-set offers a thread safety option and methods like contains all, intersect, and equal.

You do need to buy a lot of batteries with go.
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