Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Four years of Go

blog.golang.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 202 posts

Re: Four years of Go

#51

Post by throwaway344 »

sillysaurus2 wrote: post #48
aaronblohowiak wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Takes me about 10-20% longer to do trivial things in go than ruby, but the results are much faster and bigger refactorings are also much faster to complete (nice type system). The ability to really max your perf out in short amount of time is also delightful

My experience with Go was bizarre -- I loved programming in it, but I don't understand why! For example, Go has no REPL. (It's difficult for statically-typed languages to provide one.) It's commonly believed that a REPL is valuable and increases productivity. So if you were offered the choice, is there any circumstance in which "no REPL" is equally powerful as having one? Well, the vast majority of great hackers seem…

Statically typed languages don't necessarily not have a REPL, most functional languages are statically typed and yet they general have a REPL. OCaml, Haskell, F# and the like.

Re: Four years of Go

#52

Post by gillianseed »

yareally wrote: post #25
enneff wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think the comparison is supposed to be a value judgement of C++, Java, or Python. It's just an observation about how quickly the Go ecosystem has matured. Of course the internet played a huge role in this!

If one is going to compare a language to Go, I would go with C#, since it's only slightly older (2001 or so) and also backed by a major corporation.

Well since Go made it's appearance in 2009 and C# in 2000, I wouldn't call that 'only slightly older', not even by programming language standards.

Beyond that, Go certainly doesn't have the same backing from Google as C# had from Microsoft, on the other hand Microsoft had a monetary incentive to provide support and tools/frameworks as they charged for those proprietary implementations while Google is giving Go away under a permissive licence.

Anyway, for fun I looked at the language poll made here recently on HN and compared C# and Go:

C# 1130 likes, 465 dislikes Go 1126 likes, 365 dislikes

So it would seem that Go has reached the same popularity as C# here on HN atleast. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6527104

Re: Four years of Go

#54

Post by benatkin »

sillysaurus2 wrote: post #48
aaronblohowiak wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Takes me about 10-20% longer to do trivial things in go than ruby, but the results are much faster and bigger refactorings are also much faster to complete (nice type system). The ability to really max your perf out in short amount of time is also delightful

My experience with Go was bizarre -- I loved programming in it, but I don't understand why! For example, Go has no REPL. (It's difficult for statically-typed languages to provide one.) It's commonly believed that a REPL is valuable and increases productivity. So if you were offered the choice, is there any circumstance in which "no REPL" is equally powerful as having one? Well, the vast majority of great hackers seem…

Perl and PHP are also open source languages were people don't use repls often. Java and C# don't have repls either. I don't think everyone has ever thought they needed a REPL for any reasonable definition of everyone.

Re: Four years of Go

#55

Post by danenania »

sillysaurus2 wrote: post #48
aaronblohowiak wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Takes me about 10-20% longer to do trivial things in go than ruby, but the results are much faster and bigger refactorings are also much faster to complete (nice type system). The ability to really max your perf out in short amount of time is also delightful

My experience with Go was bizarre -- I loved programming in it, but I don't understand why! For example, Go has no REPL. (It's difficult for statically-typed languages to provide one.) It's commonly believed that a REPL is valuable and increases productivity. So if you were offered the choice, is there any circumstance in which "no REPL" is equally powerful as having one? Well, the vast majority of great hackers seem…

I see go as essentially a polished and robust glue language. It's not particularly well suited to data processing because its lack of functional constructs and generics makes transforming lists verbose, but it's perfect for wiring up databases, apis, system calls, sockets, queues, and the like in a way that's safe, performant, and concurrent by default.

Given this focus, it sort of makes sense why you might not miss a repl as much in go (though personally I do still miss it). Repls are most useful for exploring and experimenting with complex data, while I think go's focus is more on streamlining and bulletproofing all the machinery surrounding the data than doing a whole lot with the data itself.

I don't mean this as a criticism and I'm not trying to say that you can't do serious data processing in go, just that it's not a core strength like it is in functional languages. I think the majority of applications out there actually have fairly light data processing needs and heavy glue needs, so go's set of tradeoffs make it a great candidate for tons of projects.

Re: Four years of Go

#56

Post by adriaanm »

throwaway344 wrote: post #51
sillysaurus2 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My experience with Go was bizarre -- I loved programming in it, but I don't understand why! For example, Go has no REPL. (It's difficult for statically-typed languages to provide one.) It's commonly believed that a REPL is valuable and increases productivity. So if you were offered the choice, is there any circumstance in which "no REPL" is equally powerful as having one? Well, the vast majority of great hackers seem…

Statically typed languages don't necessarily not have a REPL, most functional languages are statically typed and yet they general have a REPL. OCaml, Haskell, F# and the like.

Another example would be Scala. It has a command-line REPL and the IDE has a worksheet[1]. I find both tremendously useful.

[1] https://github.com/scala-ide/scala-worksheet/wiki/Getting-St...

Re: Four years of Go

#57

Post by dbaupp »

coldtea wrote: post #49
dbaupp wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

None of the languages being compared against were released in the ubiquitous-internet age with things like Github and widespread blogging to drive interest and adoption.

> None of the languages being compared against were released in the ubiquitous-internet age with things like Github and widespread blogging to drive interest and adoption. Which doesn't seem to matter anyway. There are tons of languages released every year that fare even worse than languages released in 1980, despite having "ubiquitous-internet, Github and widespread blogging" at their disposal.

How many are backed by one of the largest companies on the internet?

Re: Four years of Go

#58

Post by ARolek »

I spend about 30% of my time system side in Go, and the rest in Node.js. I'm working to migrate almost all of my time to Go. The language is fun to work in and, personally, the overall experience is much improved over Node.js. It's exciting to see the momentum behind the language and the great people who are attracted to it.

Re: Four years of Go

#59

Post by pcwalton »

sillysaurus2 wrote: post #48
aaronblohowiak wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Takes me about 10-20% longer to do trivial things in go than ruby, but the results are much faster and bigger refactorings are also much faster to complete (nice type system). The ability to really max your perf out in short amount of time is also delightful

My experience with Go was bizarre -- I loved programming in it, but I don't understand why! For example, Go has no REPL. (It's difficult for statically-typed languages to provide one.) It's commonly believed that a REPL is valuable and increases productivity. So if you were offered the choice, is there any circumstance in which "no REPL" is equally powerful as having one? Well, the vast majority of great hackers seem…

> It's difficult for statically-typed languages to provide one.

No, it's not. As long as you have a way to polymorphically print a return value, which there are ways around (in Go, with reflection; in Haskell, with typeclasses; in Java, with Object's toString), there is nothing semantically difficult about a REPL for statically typed languages.

> there's no dynamic typing

Yes, there is, through `interface{}`.

Re: Four years of Go

#60

Post by codeka »

When I look at the Google Trends for "golang", China is the top region by a huge margin (the next highest region after China is Sweden at 30) [ http://i.imgur.com/XHW40kp.png ].

And the rise of interest in "golang" in general seems to correspond to the massive spike in China [ http://i.imgur.com/Y3oO2jf.png ].

I'm not really sure what that means...

Post reply on HN