61–70 of 178 posts
Another Scala user here. And I've been using Scala for the last six months. Mostly developing web applications on Scalatra and Play. I love Scala - It still has its goodiness and it's an excellent alternative to Java. If you notice in all of the Scala books (I've read the one by Martin and the One by David Pollak as well), they all seem to push you towards the functional programming model instead of the much more com…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I think Scala is an Academic language Sometimes "academic" seems like a catch-all for stuff people don't like. Scheme has a strong academic history in its use and implementation, yet it seems to be described as "academic" only when someone is unhappy with how minimalistic it is, which is the opposite issue described here.
Sorry, maybe like the other commenter mentioned below, the word I probably was looking for was 'industrial'. Or whatever refers to it as 'massive and complex'. Not necessarily a bad thing, for web development, most of it's depth is an over-kill.
I can't be the only person who thinks Go is really interesting, but can't get over the 'package' hump... It's just too wonky for 'real-world' from my experience. For example, how do you create clear lines of separation with internal modules? If you want to use 'namespaces' then each namespace has to be it's own package, which then requires its own Repo that you have to 'go get'. There's unsustainable for a project of…
As others have pointed out, you can use directories as namespaces, which works nicely. But I've found, personally, that splitting my projects into separate repos for each namespace is actually beneficial. Helps keep my code clean and separated.
That being said, versioning is a real pain right now. The best thing I've found is to fork a repo when I decide to use it, then pull in updates as I adjust my code to work with them. Definitely not ideal, and if you have a lot of projects using the same dependency, it becomes a major headache.
There are some workarounds, and we've discussed the topic at great length on the mailing list. I think it's something we'll see a solution to in the next few years. But one of the things about Go that I really enjoy is that the core team is hesitant to push half-baked ideas onto the community. When we see a solution, it tends to be an elegant, clean solution that fits perfectly into the problem it solves.
In other words: yes, there are some problems. Yes, I do think they'll go away. Yes, I do think we'll need to be patient. Yes, I do think it will be worth it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think we need more than 1 account of Go in production before we start high-fiving each other about Go in the mainstream. And to be fair to the person you are responding too, there has been an inordinate amount of Go articles on HN over the last few months compared to anywhere else on the internet tech/dev wise, so much so that a number of my friends have independently made a joke of it.
> I think we need more than 1 account of Go in production before we start high-fiving each other about Go in the mainstream. http://code.google.com/p/go-wiki/wiki/GoUsers http://code.google.com/p/go-wiki/wiki/SuccessStories Just sayin'.
Another Scala user here. And I've been using Scala for the last six months. Mostly developing web applications on Scalatra and Play. I love Scala - It still has its goodiness and it's an excellent alternative to Java. If you notice in all of the Scala books (I've read the one by Martin and the One by David Pollak as well), they all seem to push you towards the functional programming model instead of the much more com…
For an academic language (which I assume is factually true as it was developed in a university) it is one of the most developer friendly academic languages out there IMHO, I rather write Scala than Java in terms of complexity, and if I would need to rewrite a Ruby code base, I would give it a shot in Scala before trying Go (feels more natural to me, they have way more similarities than I thought) I have the parts I n…
Now that you mention compile time -- one of the biggest things that the Go designers cared about was compile-time. Go touts it as one of its major pros; and I do agree for personal experience that compile time matters.
You can often cut down compile-time by making "run-time compromises". For instance, with C++ code, dyn-linking rather statically linking everything can speed up things significantly. This is because with massive C++ codebases, when you change a couple of lines, rebuilding the relevant objects only takes a few seconds - but the static linking stage can take forever.
On memory constrained system (4GB) of RAM, I've seen a particular codebase that I've worked with take up to 28 minutes just to link. The same code on a machine with 8 gigs of RAM (just double) took less than 4 minutes to link. Due to the sheer number of objects that need to be linked, your system ends up thrashing (swapping pages out to disk).
That being said, I read somewhere that Go doesn't support incremental compilation. I don't if this is still true, but that's a major problem that needs to be fixed right away.
With interpreted languages, practically everything is done at run-time and you have no compilation stage -- but at a massive performance penalty. Tracing JITs do help though.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
For real? That's cray. I didn't know the syntax was so hard to internalize.
For a while I thought you meant Seymour Cray, or one of the supercomputers he designed and built. Was it so hard to type one letter in support of readability? Or is "cray" its own word now?
"Two years in, Go has never been our bottleneck, it has always been the database." I would expect this to be true with any language, if you code well. Regular web applications do not have state so they are very easily scaled horizontally anyway. Databases on the other hand are trickier to scale the same way and will end up being the bottleneck almost all the time.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Go on Android would be great, but Google used Java in the first place so that they could leverage all the Java devs in the world to build Android apps. Go might be a much better choice from a pure dev standpoint, but from a getting everyone to build apps standpoint, it's a fail in the short/middle term.
I didn't say get everyone to build apps. It would simply be another option. App development is getting more competitive, of course, so people that want to stand out might need to move to Go to gain an edge. Plus, I image that a Go environment might provide a better interactive development cycle.
Another Scala user here. And I've been using Scala for the last six months. Mostly developing web applications on Scalatra and Play. I love Scala - It still has its goodiness and it's an excellent alternative to Java. If you notice in all of the Scala books (I've read the one by Martin and the One by David Pollak as well), they all seem to push you towards the functional programming model instead of the much more com…
> I think Scala is an Academic language Sometimes "academic" seems like a catch-all for stuff people don't like. Scheme has a strong academic history in its use and implementation, yet it seems to be described as "academic" only when someone is unhappy with how minimalistic it is, which is the opposite issue described here.
I want a language that is small, clean, and can provide a lot of static guarantees. I know many people find static guarantees and unacceptable curtailment of their "programming freedom", but frankly I think it's the answer to many of the problems we face in software today. Small is another thing. E.g. Go and Scheme are small. C++ and Scala are large. You know what I mean..
Now, static typing is just one kind of static assertion[1] I'd like to have. Side effect isolation (i.e. language-enforced purity) would be another feature I'd like to see become common. For example, the D programming language has a "pure" keyword that lets you mark a function as side-effect free. (In Haskell, all function are pure by default, and you escape the confines of purity via monads.)
I'd like to do research into (inventing) other forms of static assertions. One thing that's been on my mind lately, has been static "complexity assertion" for programs. I don't know if this even possible, but it would be nice to be able to ascertain before running a program, certain time & space complexity bounds on it. This would perhaps require us to drop the programming language itself to some level "slightly below" Turing machines -- but this in itself could be achieved via a keyword like D's "pure" or something more elegant. (Note: my point is not that we're going to make the entire language non-Turing complete -- but rather that we'll have subsets of the language that are not, and this reduction of power would/could bring with it a greater possibility for statically asserting stuff.)
[1] FYI I made this term up. Let me know if there's something better that describes this.