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Go is boring

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Re: Go is boring

#61

Post by jroesch »

trung_pham wrote: post #50
mikebike wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perl's a dynamic language, but return type can vary based on context. I once saw this really bite someone where the presence of parentheses on the left-hand side of the expression changed the behavior of the function being called on the right-hand side. Not fun to debug that one.

Exactly. Duck typing sucks. I don't know why it was invented...

It only "sucks"(causes problems rarely, and can be quite useful regardless) in dynamic languages. Languages like Go, Rust, and Haskell provide the same flexibility with static guarantees. All you must do is define type specific implementations to satisfy the interface(or typeclass). For example in Haskell, I can so something like:

    class Stream s where
      read :: s -> (a, s)
      write :: a -> s -> s
and extend it to any type:

    instance Stream [Int] where
      read s = ...
      write a s = ...

    instance Stream File where
      ...
and so on, and I can now pass any type that is a member of Stream, to a function that expects one.

Re: Go is boring

#62

Post by irahul »

dhconnelly wrote: post #36
ak217 wrote: post #33

This sounds really interesting and compelling. As someone new to Go... What would be the advantages of using Go over Python (taking into account the emergence and future ascendancy of pypy)?

A few: - Go has language-level support, in the form of goroutines, for multithreaded concurrency. Python is single-OS-thread-only, and PyPy doesn't change that. - Go has enough static typing to help you write safer code, without the verbosity of "bigger" languages like C++ or Java. If you write a lot of tests for your Python app, you might not have variable typos or function argument type mismatches, but in Go the co…

> Python is single-OS-thread-only, and PyPy doesn't change that.

Python uses native multi-threads, but the GIL restriction means only one thread can run at a time regardless of number of cores or processors you have.

> If you write a lot of tests for your Python app, you might not have variable typos or function argument type mismatches, but in Go the compiler catches these things.

Use pylint and/or syntastic(for vim).

> Go is compiled to machine code. This means that, barring a miracle in JIT/VM research, Go will probably always be faster than PyPy for most tasks.

Go is slower than Java.

http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32/benchmark.php?test=all...

They removed lua-jit from the benchmarks. lua-jit will smoke go in most scenarios. Here is a comparison between lua-jit and lua.

http://luajit.org/performance_x86.html

Native code doesn't mean "always faster than JIT/VM". A good JIT can do optimizations which a static compiler can't. For a long running process with hotspots(same code hit multiple times), a JIT can be as good as(or better) than native code.

Re: Go is boring

#63

Post by j2labs »

ww520 wrote: post #35
hasenj wrote: post #8

I'd like to point out that I never heard of coroutines before Go. Not even in computer science; and I did take an Operating Systems course. I also never seen any language doing interfaces like Go. Go does it just right. I find that this is pretty impressive as a feature on its own.

coroutine is an old concept before threading became popular. It was usually implemented as a green-thread library. For C, setjmp/longjmp was used to implement it. Some libraries messed around with the stack register to implement it. GO puts it as a first class citizen in the language. Other languages might call it Actor, light weight thread, fiber, task, etc. It's popular in embedded systems to implement cooperative…

A coroutine is not the same as an Actor, though actors can be implemented with coroutines.

Re: Go is boring

#64

Post by tikhonj »

protomyth wrote: post #19
eru wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alas, nobody has written a really good IDE for Haskell, yet. So we still have to run the show for that statically typed language manually.

If I ever develop a program language, the first action I will take is the clang approach and make it a library based architecture. That way, people can build tools for the language including IDE integration without having to reinvent the wheel.

I think GHC does something like that. At the very least, it exposes an API that lets you do all sorts of fun things. There are projects like Scion[1] that let you integrate that into an editor.

[1]: https://github.com/nominolo/scion/

However, there is simply less drive to develop tooling like that for Haskell than there is for Java. Haskell is a much easier language to use given just a moderately intelligent text editor and a REPL than most others. Java, on the other hand, it verbose and annoying even with a very good IDE.

So Haskell can have good support, but since it isn't terribly necessary it isn't anything like a top priority.

Re: Go is boring

#65

Post by BasDirks »

dscrd wrote: post #52
ozataman wrote: post #29

I've tried giving Go a try a bunch of times now. My primary choice of language is Haskell and I just can't seem to get excited about Go.

What if I told you that you're not supposed to be excited about your programming language?

I can see where you're coming from but for a programmer who is beyond "programming puberty" it is a great plus to be in love with their programming languages. Even better if he/she is unfaithful, and has massive orgies (oh wait did I just take this analogy too far?)

Re: Go is boring

#66

Post by irahul »

cmelbye wrote: post #24
trung_pham wrote: post #2

I love static typed language. With a proper IDE, code navigation, completion work like magic. I end up doing less typing than the dynamic typed language. Have you ever tried to auto complete the 'init' function in RubyMine? It will ask you which one of the 100 init functions do you mean. :) Not with static typed language. There is only one init function to choose from because the IDE knows the exact type you are work…

Which IDE do you use with Go?

Vim with gocode https://github.com/nsf/gocode

Re: Go is boring

#67

Post by alexatkeplar »

cageface wrote: post #14
trung_pham wrote: post #2

I love static typed language. With a proper IDE, code navigation, completion work like magic. I end up doing less typing than the dynamic typed language. Have you ever tried to auto complete the 'init' function in RubyMine? It will ask you which one of the 100 init functions do you mean. :) Not with static typed language. There is only one init function to choose from because the IDE knows the exact type you are work…

I do too but I'm finding that a lot of the time there are so many untyped inputs to a system that the static typing doesn't buy you that much. There always seems to be a ton of xml configuration data, incoming JSON from web services, databases with different type schemes etc.

As soon as you receive an untyped input, make it conform to a typed data structure, and throw some kind of error if you can't. That way you catch any issues in your input data long before it bubbles through your app and causes a problem which is super-hard to track down.

See e.g. DictShield for Python (https://github.com/j2labs/dictshield), Jackson for JVM (http://jackson.codehaus.org/), Swiz for node.js (https://github.com/racker/node-swiz)...

Re: Go is boring

#68

Post by tomp »

onan_barbarian wrote: post #30

I reached the same conclusion ("Go is boring") myself, but with a different flavor. After having spent a great deal of time in recent years doing things like GPGPU and a _whole_ lot of SIMD programming (not to mention a lot of use of the STL, BGL, etc), I have to say I'm less impressed by the boringness (aka taking good, solid choices from existing languages) of Go. I understand that not everyone is excited about SIM…

Hey, I'm really interested in exploiting the GPU for GP programming, and also in how the SIMD can help you... Would you be willing to give me some examples of the most common/useful uses?

Re: Go is boring

#69

Post by nimrody »

ozataman wrote: post #53
thebigshane wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you say your interest in programming languages is largely academic in nature? I get the impression that Haskell mostly (for now at least) fits best with academia, Java/C# for enterprise, python/ruby for smallish web apps, Go/C/C++/Java for industrial applications (like servers, etc). There is a very real possibility that Go is just not the right fit for you with your current requirements. No language is the rig…

Not at all. In fact about 95% of all Haskell I write - and I write quite a bit - is for commercial stuff, ranging all the way across large-ish (not quite google-scale, yet) scale computation, distributed systems, machine learning, modeling/simulations and web development. More academic feeling stuff like parsing and DSLs are just the cherries on top (though even those were for commercial uses). I'll admit Haskell has…

Can you recommend any open source project that you consider a good example of Haskell usage?

(meaning both practical and well-written)

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