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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

#771

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

#772

Post by AnimalMuppet »

sanderjd wrote: post #765
AnimalMuppet wrote: post #560

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Good enough" plus "I already know it" almost always beats the perfect tool that I don't already know.

There is obviously truth in this, but I think it is more often the case than many people think it is that it is more efficient to learn the better tool "good enough" than to use the worse "I already know it" tool. For instance, I've seen lots of people not want to learn sql and instead write complicated imperative implementations of relational primitives in the "I already know it" programming languages that are clear…

Well, there's a balance. I'm not saying "never learn anything new, assembly's good enough and I know how to use it". Learn newer and better tools.

At the same time, don't learn every newer and better tool. There are too many. You don't have enough time, even if you never do anything but learn.

SQL is enough better to be worth learning. The web framework of the week? Not so much.

And what's "worth learning" depends on what you're trying to do. For a home project, I'll use what I know, unless the goal of the project is "learn how to use X". For work, the question is whether it brings enough to the table to be worth the learning time. Sometimes it is; often it isn't.

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

#773

Post by sanderjd »

actionfromafar wrote: post #263
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…

My personal Python threshold is 10k lines. After that I tend to loose track of what I am doing and I start to miss static typing and nowadays, an IDE to navigate it. Maybe future Python IDEs can AI scan the codebase and compensate.

Type annotations plus modern IDEs have (in my experience) made this mostly a non-issue. It does require a bit more setup to get passable static analysis set up, which comes "for free" in languages with good compilers (like go!), but it's at least possible now to get to a (IMO) good point.

(FWIW, I moved away from python and ruby over a decade ago because of exactly this frustration, but I'm finding modern python to be pretty pleasant.)

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

#774

Post by sanderjd »

Yoric wrote: post #427
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…

> The author lists multiple reasons for this, but for me the biggest one is the first one: Go is good for almost everything. I'd nuance that claim. I haven't found Go to be _particularly good_ at any specific task I've undertaken, but Go was _good enough_ for many of these tasks. Which makes Go a reasonable general programming language.

This is true, but there are a number of _good enough_ languages, and personally I don't think go is top-tier at this use case of being the go-to swiss army knife. I do think it is top-tier at being a good choice for tools in its niche. But not as "default language I reach for when I don't want to waste time thinking about it".

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

#775

Post by sanderjd »

mjw_byrne wrote: post #578
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…

4. Stability and backwards-compatibility. I have never seen a Go version upgrade break anything. Meanwhile I have colleagues who do a thousand-yard-stare if you so much as mention upgrading the version of Python we're using.

Python upgrades are fine, actually. The python library ecosystem is a bit of a mess in general, which does affect this, but the tools have actually improved to make this more manageable lately.

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

#776

Post by sanderjd »

cube2222 wrote: post #102
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…

Yeah, this. It's just good enough for 95% of use-cases, while being very productive. Personally, one of the biggest selling points for me is that imo modelling concurrency and asynchronicity via fibers (goroutines), rather than async/await, is just a ton easier and faster to work with. Again, there are use-cases for the alternative (mainly performance, or if you like to express everything in your type-system) but it'…

I always find it odd when people refer to it as being "very productive". I find all the boilerplate very un-productive to work with. Every time I pick go back up I'm shocked how many manual loops and conditionals I have to write.

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

#777

Post by sapiogram »

ratorx wrote: post #756
sapiogram wrote: post #754

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've worked in Go for two years, and I hate zero values with a passion. I would much prefer undefined/nil/whatever as a default value. At least that obviously represents an invalid value, and will crash on use, become `null` in the database and when serialized to JSON. `0`, however, is indistinguishable from "missing data", and will just sit there and slowly poison your production data over time.

I don’t think you mean that. By undefined, I was referring to C-style undefined behaviour stemming from reading uninitialised memory (which is the only alternative to not setting the memory to a known value when it is declared but not initialised). This is clearly worse than zero values because at least zero values won’t result in initialisation from memory which could be anything. If “null” is better for your use ca…

> I don’t think you mean that. By undefined, I was referring to C-style undefined behaviour stemming from reading uninitialised memory

You're right, I was referring to Javascript-style `undefined`, where it's basically a 2nd `null` value.

> The easiest way to represent this in Go is to use pointers to the type, which have the zero-value of nil.

This certainly works, but it has some serious drawbacks imo:

* Performance overhead

* The integer field is no longer copied along with the struct. The resulting aliasing shenanigans can easily trip up experienced developers, because "why would anyone store an `*int` in a struct instead of a plain `int`?"

* Other silly mistakes that no linters catch, such as comparing the pointers when you meant to compare the raw values.

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

#778

Post by sanderjd »

lantry wrote: post #129
kaba0 wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is it different than, say, java for this generalist purpose?

IME, there are two main differences between go and java: 1) go is more "batteries included". Modules, linting, testing, and much more are all part of the standard cli. Also, the go stdlib has a ton of stuff; in java, there is almost always a well-built third party library, but that requires you to find and learn more things instead of just reaching for stdlib every time. 2) golang is "newer" and "more refined". this…

FWIW, I think versions of java from the last 5ish years feel both "newer" and "more refined" than go.

But I do think go and java are very comparable languages. To me, go's advantage over java is more about use-case; go is the clear choice for little cli tools, because it's pretty far off the beaten path to coax java to start up quickly enough for this. This is the sweet spot for go, IMO.

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

#779

Post by sanderjd »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #772
sanderjd wrote: post #765

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is obviously truth in this, but I think it is more often the case than many people think it is that it is more efficient to learn the better tool "good enough" than to use the worse "I already know it" tool. For instance, I've seen lots of people not want to learn sql and instead write complicated imperative implementations of relational primitives in the "I already know it" programming languages that are clear…

Well, there's a balance. I'm not saying "never learn anything new, assembly's good enough and I know how to use it". Learn newer and better tools. At the same time, don't learn every newer and better tool. There are too many. You don't have enough time, even if you never do anything but learn. SQL is enough better to be worth learning. The web framework of the week? Not so much. And what's "worth learning" depends on…

Yeah what I'd say is: Seek out and be open to advice. There's a "don't know what you don't know" problem here, as always. But this is also part of the point of reading sites like HN! People here are saying "actually there are tools that are net positive to learn a bit because they are much better choices for particular niches". That is advice! It's fine and all to say "nah, I'm good", but in many cases that's doing yourself a disservice. I really do see people writing tedious for loops in go because it is what they're comfortable with, when they would be much better served writing sql and using a language with dataframes.

Most of the time people aren't just on a kick about selling some hot new thing (and I'm old enough that go was the hot new thing for me at one point!), they actually have relevant experience and are giving useful advice.

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

#780

Post by sanderjd »

ratorx wrote: post #734
sanderjd wrote: post #568

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 think Go is pretty OK as a language for building data pipelines (I’m assuming you meant statistical ones, but the same argument applies to more data transform-y ones). What it is not good for is doing exploratory analysis (which is where Python shines). Manual loops are pretty annoying when the focus is on figuring out which loops to write (exploratory phase). However, they are pretty nice once you’ve figured it ou…

Well I totally disagree that writing manual loops is ever "pretty nice", but I agree that it's not as big an issue in final-version code as it is in exploration.

And I'm also in strong agreement that making any language transition between exploration and implementation is problematic. I do think go is worse than most, because I just think it has a mostly cultural allergy to manipulating collections of data as collections rather than element-by-element, but I agree that this is mostly lost in the noise of doing any re-write into a new language.

But this is why Python is best in this space. It simply has the best promotion path from experimentation to production. It is better than other "real" languages like go, because it thrives in the exploratory phase, and it is better than purpose-specific languages, like R, because it is also a great general-purpose language.

The other contender I see is Julia, which comes more from the experimentation-focused side, while trying to become a good general purpose language, but unfortunately I think it still needs to mature a lot on that side, and it's not clear that it has the community to push it far enough fast enough in that direction (IMO).

Even very performance-critical use cases work with python, because the iteration process can follow experimentation -> productionization -> performance analysis -> fixing low-hanging bottlenecks by offloading to existing native extensions -> writing custom native extensions for the real bottlenecks.

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