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Why you should use Go

mortenvistisen.com

21–30 of 75 posts

Re: Why you should use Go

#21
I can’t stand go. It is painful and annoying to write compared to almost any modern language. Yes it’s simple, and makes it easy to write concurrent programs using one particular style of concurrency, which are about the only good things anyone can say about it.

The proponents of go seem to have an almost cult-like devotion to simplicity. They think adding any facility for abstraction makes a language into a complicated mess like C++, and any type system feature that didn’t exist in C makes a language into an ivory tower academic plaything like Haskell. The way the author talks about spending all day writing a perfectly beautiful, inscrutable piece of Rust code is an example of that. Yes, there are a few things in rust that are a bit harder to understand, but not to such an exaggerated extent, and that strawman is really not the typical experience when writing Rust. It’s very unusual for an experienced user of any mainstream language (except C++) to have any real difficulty understanding what a given piece of code does.

Re: Why you should use Go

#22
This horse has been long flogged to death.

My list: Mostly fits in my head, gc, not horribly slow, boring concurrency, low effort cross-compilation, good distribution story.

It's contentious but I like the "low abstraction ceiling". Go punishes people who want to turn everything into a framework or abstraction and rewards people who just knuckle down and write the code that solves the actual problem instance.

Is it the "best" programming language on any single axis? Absolutely not. Are the ergonomics right for getting stuff done? Yep, at least for this commenter.

Re: Why you should use Go

#23
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Go is limited. There are too many ways people in my company can fuck up C# code, it's much harder to spend time moving around letters with Golang.

Sure, that's a risk. But force feeding everyone Go is worse. Code reviews would be a more constructive approach to the same goal.

I can't code review every one of 150 devs under me. I can't depend on heroes saving the day. Heroes go do their own thing eventually.

Re: Why you should use Go

#25
Starting a new side gig with Go next month and I’m pretty excited. It’ll be my first big Go project. I’ll be using htmx to handle FE stuff and I’m still discussing with the UX designer (they use Webflow) if we can somehow take htmx into account at design time. MySQL as db (customer’s choice), so let’s see how that stacks up.

Re: Why you should use Go

#26
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, that's a risk. But force feeding everyone Go is worse. Code reviews would be a more constructive approach to the same goal.

I can't code review every one of 150 devs under me. I can't depend on heroes saving the day. Heroes go do their own thing eventually.

if you think you need to code review for 150 people or your code base will get out of control then it sounds like there’s bigger problems going on

Re: Why you should use Go

#28

I can’t stand go. It is painful and annoying to write compared to almost any modern language. Yes it’s simple, and makes it easy to write concurrent programs using one particular style of concurrency, which are about the only good things anyone can say about it. The proponents of go seem to have an almost cult-like devotion to simplicity. They think adding any facility for abstraction makes a language into a complica…

I guess I'm part of that cult as I value simplicity greatly. Heck I was even against generics and iterators, though the former has grown on me a bit.

One question I ask in earnest, why do people not just use another language rather than try to get features jammed into Go? There are so many good ones out there now, it feels like a person can choose something to their own liking.

If it's being forced at work, I guess that makes some sense, but I'm also a big proponent of 'when in Rome.'

Re: Why you should use Go

#29
i'm at my point in my career (20 years xp) where i think every project should be built around pure functions and structs, sorted in modules. And only once you're sure there absolutely no other choices, add a bit of interfaces, class and inheritance. Which, imho should happen extremely rarely.

I've come to realize that the amount of useless abstractions we add just because the language lets us, instead of thinking more deeply about what exactly is the problem we're facing, is just insane.

Re: Why you should use Go

#30
The author here, thanks for posting this. I can see a lot of people not agreeing with Go, that’s fine, I still love writing it everyday. Taking choices away from you in terms of language features enables you to focus on the problem you’re solving. That makes it a great choice to me.
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