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Four years of Go

blog.golang.org

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Re: Four years of Go

#81

Post by dbaupp »

gillianseed wrote: post #52
yareally wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 u…

HN is a hotbed of early adopters (and Microsoft is not a favourite among many readers).

Re: Four years of Go

#82

Post by alok-g »

venuzr wrote: post #67
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.

Are you saying that making sure the type is correct (just before the cast) becomes the programmer's responsibility? How often does this happen?

Re: Four years of Go

#83

Post by mjcohen »

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!

How about the state of Fortran or COBOL after four years?

Re: Four years of Go

#84

Post by martinvol »

There is a fallacy in this quote: "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!" This comparison is more than unfair, in the 90's only a few people had an internet connection. Or Do you want to create Open Source projects by mail? Git or Subversion didn't even exist back then. Now imagine in 1987...

Re: Four years of Go

#85

Post by axaxs »

enneff wrote: post #4
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!

Keith wasn't referring to the Google Trends chart. It is an unrelated quote about the state of the various languages' ecosystems 4 years after their release dates.

With all due respect, I don't feel he is/was old enough to make such claims, as judging by his picture. Not saying that he is right or wrong, only the wrong person to make such claims.

Re: Four years of Go

#86

Post by laureny »

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…

> Or do you believe in the other possibility: having a REPL doesn't matter as much as everyone thought?

The importance of REPL is very exaggerated. Neither Java, C#, C++ nor C have one (and together, these four languages probably make up for 95% of programming languages).

There is nothing that prevents any of these languages to get one (Scala has one, a bunch of these exist for other statically typed languages), it's just not that useful when you have powerful IDE's at your disposal.

Most of the time I need REPL-like functionalities, I need it in the heart of my application, with all its structures and state initialized and in the middle of a breakpoint. I hardly ever need to type snippets of code with zero context around them, which is what REPL's offer.

Re: Four years of Go

#87

Post by cmccabe »

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…

You don't really need a REPL when compiles take literally only a second or two. It's only the fact that C++ had a static type system where programs took (literally) hours to compile that made dynamic typing look so great in comparison. "Poorly designed static type systems drive people to dynamic typing," as Rob Pike said.

Re: Four years of Go

#88

Post by mseepgood »

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 commonly believed that a REPL is valuable and increases productivity

A REPL is a nice learning tool, but actually not that useful for productive programming. Go has a playground for learning and experimenting.

Re: Four years of Go

#89

Post by laureny »

martinvol wrote: post #84

There is a fallacy in this quote: "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!" This comparison is more than unfair, in the 90's only a few people had an internet connection. Or Do you want to create Open Source projects by mail? Git or Subversion didn't even exist back then. Now imagine in 1987...

> 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!" This comparison is more than unfair,

It's more than unfair since they don't show any numbers. At all. Not for Go, not for Java, not for anything.

The graph is cute but it's not even a number of installations, projects on githubs or lines of source code: it's Google searches. Searches measure nothing more than buzz. I bet Google Wave showed similar curves facing up for months.

If the Go team had hard and impressive numbers, I bet they would show them. The fact that they don't makes me think that Go is not seeing a lot of traction, besides a few Python and Ruby programmers.

Re: Four years of Go

#90

Post by craigyk »

I want to like Go. There's definitely some parts that are great, but for a relatively new language there were missed opportunities to adopt awesome features in other PLs. There are also some internal inconsistencies that I find grating. These inconsistencies are particularly irksome given how opinionated Go is (and how much I agree with most of those opinions).
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