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Four years of Go

blog.golang.org

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Re: Four years of Go

#61

Post by Pxtl »

threeseed wrote: post #23
thrownaway2424 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's true. Java in the 90s was a spectacular con job that millions of developers and managers bought hook, line, and sinker. XML was pretty big back then, too, and now nobody gives two warm shits about XML. Just saying. Anyway the hype is surely not the reason why anyone should use go. People should use go because it has good libraries, encourages good interfaces, is fast and space efficient, has good self document…

Spectacular con job ? Are you joking ? There was and continues to remain NOTHING that compares to the Java platform.

Python was around and was just dandy for most of the stuff people were doing with Java.

Re: Four years of Go

#62

Post by tracker1 »

sitkack wrote: post #30
misnome wrote: post #2

> "The state of the Go ecosystem after only four years is astounding. Compare Go in 2013 to Python in 1995 or Java in 1999. Or C++ in 1987!" Wow! The state of C++ searches on google were 0 in 1987, as were searches for "Apples" and "Oranges" so go must be doing incredibly well to have infinity times the results!

Everything in "the future" will always have faster adoption curves. There is more of everything so comparing them is quite difficult.

Not sure about that.. wasn't ruby around for some time before rails caused the relatively large uptake?

Re: Four years of Go

#63

Post by columbo »

codeka wrote: post #60

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...

Could just be false signals for people googling "Go" the game and not the language. Golang is the first search on a generic search for "Go" (https://www.google.com.hk/webhp?hl=zh-CN&sa=N&tab=lw#hl=zh-C...).

Re: Four years of Go

#64

Post by tptacek »

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…

Golang is like a touring car. It's fast, but doesn't have the fastest engine. It's got some nice features, and it's comfortable (at least for the driver), but it doesn't have every bell and whistle. But: the handling is amazing; it's a monster in the corners.

You could give a BMW M3 a faster engine, or a more full-featured Bluetooth sound system, but it's the way the steering wheel feels that makes people love that car. Same with Golang. They did an extraordinary job balancing the language, especially if you're the kind of programmer (a systems developer) that appreciates that kind of balance.

Re: Four years of Go

#65

Post by rmcpherson »

codeka wrote: post #60

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...

Go is quite popular in China, especially on Windows. I'm not sure of the reasons for that, but Rob Pike and Andrew Gerrand do mention it in this interview on the ChangeLog: http://thechangelog.com/100/

Re: Four years of Go

#66

Post by dualogy »

alok-g wrote: post #53

Those experienced in Go, do you miss generics?

Since Go has generics for slices (aka arrays), maps (aka dictionaries / hash-tables) and channels, I was pleasantly surprised how little I miss them in practice. Just some adaptation-of-thinking-habits mostly. Don't miss them anymore. I have a micro-codegen pre-build step (written in Go of course) for the very few use-cases where something akin to those (more generally, templated programming) does come in handy. But those are really far and few between.

Re: Four years of Go

#67

Post by venuzr »

alok-g wrote: post #53

Those experienced in Go, do you miss generics?

That was my initial struggle as well coming into Go (I have worked for several years in C# & Java). You learn to work around this limitation using interfaces for both function parameters and return types. Frankly, I have had to do a little more explicit typecasting that I would have liked (going from interfaces to the actual type) but it is ok.

Re: Four years of Go

#68

Post by genwin »

sitkack wrote: post #28
sergiotapia wrote: post #13

I'm betting on Go at the moment, using it to build some little libraries and writing some dummy apps to test the waters. Hopefully in 4 years when Golang developers are in demand, I have 4 years of experience under my belt. :)

Programming is now multi-language and multi-paradigm. It matters more what you can do and not what you can do it in. Being able to compose libraries and systems from parts is way more important than knowing a specific language.

I'm thinking Go has got to eventually eclipse Python in popularity, since the former can do the same work using a fraction of the servers, for about the same coding difficulty.

Re: Four years of Go

#69

Post by _delirium »

sergiotapia wrote: post #13

I'm betting on Go at the moment, using it to build some little libraries and writing some dummy apps to test the waters. Hopefully in 4 years when Golang developers are in demand, I have 4 years of experience under my belt. :)

By then you'll need at least 10 years of Go experience to qualify for the job postings. ;-)

Re: Four years of Go

#70

Post by kevrone »

We are writing/rewriting a lot of services at Timehop in Go. It's not quite as productive as programming in ruby, but it's surprisingly close (For simple services, anyhow) and its multiplexing characteristics seem pretty slick when you're used to using delayed_jobs in ruby.

However, if you do a lot of collection processing, you start to really itch for something like generics (Which can lead down some pretty interesting rabbit holes: http://blog.burntsushi.net/type-parametric-functions-golang). I think this is a pretty big feature to be missing, actually. I hope it comes soon in future updates. It's pretty frustrating to have to reimplement data structures that can accomodate custom structs.

But overall, it's very impressive, and a step in the right direction. I think we're approaching a golden age of programming languages, where syntax, expressiveness, and performance are all given equal seats at the table.

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