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

91–100 of 202 posts

Re: Four years of Go

#91

Post by laureny »

thrownaway2424 wrote: post #27
threeseed wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I assume you mean in terms of hype? Java can do stuff and people use it which is fine. The con was that it was inherently portable and secure and can be used for client software. None of that is true. Today if someone told me that our new client interface was going to be java that person would be reassigned to a role where their awful judgement would not resurface. Java today is basically the slower edition of C++ wh…

> I assume you mean in terms of hype?

There is nothing wrong with hype if that hype is warranted, and Java certainly has an unmatched track record in terms of delivering solid, portable and easy to maintain code bases that power millions of applications today.

> The con was that it was inherently portable and secure and can be used for client software.

Java hasn't been pitched for client software since the death of applets, circa 1999.

Java is so good in so many domains that it's easier to name the areas where it's not the best: graphical applications and CPU intensive programs (games, numerical calculations). That's about it. For anything else, Java is most likely to be a very solid default choice.

Re: Four years of Go

#92

Post by tensor »

laureny wrote: post #86
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…

> 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…

I routinely initialize quite complex states in the repl during development. If anything, it's even more important in that situation since it can often take a long time to get to that state-point in the program.

Re: Four years of Go

#93

Post by laureny »

enneff wrote: post #29
chetanahuja wrote: post #24

Looks like Go is succeeding more in the space where scripting languages like Python and Ruby are dominant and less in it's original intended space (systems programming). Rob Pike has written about it too. I wonder if they see this as an opportunity missed or unexpected boon.

We definitely made a mistake at launch using the term "systems programming", because people automatically think of operating systems. What we meant were the kind of systems we build at google. Some of the examples in the blog post are "systems programming" in the same sense. So we are pleased to see Go being used for the job it was designed for, but we are also happy to see that Go has a broader appeal.

> So we are pleased to see Go being used for the job it was designed for,

This sounds a bit like revisionism. Rob Pike made it clear that the initial motivation for Go was the slowness of the C++ compilation.

Go was clearly initially targeted at replacing C++ and it's not being successful in that area at all.

Personally, I think it will grab a decent amount of Ruby and Python programmers but it won't go much further than that.

Re: Four years of Go

#94

Post by mseepgood »

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...

China is the world's most populous country, with a population of over 1.35 billion. That's 19% of the world population.

Re: Four years of Go

#95

Post by tensor »

thrownaway2424 wrote: post #12
spullara wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems pretty far behind Java in terms of adoption. By 1999, virtually all new enterprise development was being done on Java. In 1997 Java was already #4 on the TIOBE language popularity index. Go isn't even close.

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…

Both Java and the XML are in heavy use today with plenty of people caring about them.

XML is still the right tool for the job for many use cases. JSON is great for serializing data structures. XML is great for marking up various types of textual data.

Other people have already covered your comment on Java.

Re: Four years of Go

#96

Post by shurcooL »

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…

Go makes it very easy to create tools on top of it. And its fast compiler enables doing things almost as if it's a dynamic language.

I've made a live editor [1] for Go that I use very happily (and I keep working on a 2nd generation version, rewritten in Go, which will be more user-friendly to install and use).

There are other REPL-like tools like [2] and [3].

[1] https://github.com/shurcooL/Conception#demonstration

[2] https://github.com/sriram-srinivasan/gore

[3] https://github.com/shurcooL/goe#examples

Re: Four years of Go

#97

Post by axaxs »

laureny wrote: post #93
enneff wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We definitely made a mistake at launch using the term "systems programming", because people automatically think of operating systems. What we meant were the kind of systems we build at google. Some of the examples in the blog post are "systems programming" in the same sense. So we are pleased to see Go being used for the job it was designed for, but we are also happy to see that Go has a broader appeal.

> So we are pleased to see Go being used for the job it was designed for, This sounds a bit like revisionism. Rob Pike made it clear that the initial motivation for Go was the slowness of the C++ compilation. Go was clearly initially targeted at replacing C++ and it's not being successful in that area at all. Personally, I think it will grab a decent amount of Ruby and Python programmers but it won't go much further…

I see that as an obvious mistake. C++ is so different than C, and I imagine most C purists despite it. Go created a smarter C, and presented it as the solution. The problem though is that C++ people likely aren't C purists to begin with, or that C purists are too into C. Compounded by those who only drop to C when needed, you begin to see why it failed initially in this segment. I do think it will continue to gain adoption, but linux is such a firm C membership club that it will either be painfully slow, or else require Go to play nicer with C.

Re: Four years of Go

#98

Post by mimighost »

rmcpherson wrote: post #65
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/

A lot of webgame companies use Go, because of its performance in concurrency.

Re: Four years of Go

#99

Post by bad_user »

laureny wrote: post #86
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…

> 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…

The REPL and IDEs are somewhat orthogonal. IDEs are extremely limited in fact, as they can only rely on static-type info to infer meaningful stuff about how your software will behave. A REPL on the other hand is a runtime instance of your software that you can touch and interact with.

Btw, in regards to needing initialized state - code that can't be initialized easily, smells badly. And in Python and Ruby for example, you can stop the execution at any point in your software and initialize the REPL, having complete access to the current context.

In Ruby it's as easy as:

   require 'ruby-debug'; debugger
In Python it's as easy as the following (add IPython to the mix for extra awesomeness):

   import pdb; pdb.set_trace()
I'm working with Scala lately and doing the above is a little painful, but I still work with the REPL a lot, in spite of also using IntelliJ IDEA as an IDE.

It's true that Java, C# or C/C++ don't have a REPL, but that's why I don't use Java, C# or C/C++ (or Go).

Re: Four years of Go

#100

Post by eonil »

alok-g wrote: post #53

Those experienced in Go, do you miss generics?

At first, I thought Generic is not that much desired. But after having some time with Go, I think Go really need generics.

The problem is Go lacks immutable data structure. I believe everybody know why immutable data structure is required. Go slice and map are all mutable-only, so to make some read-only data view, we need to write all the containers by hand. Amount of code increases exponentially.

It would be great if Go had such a immutable slice/map stuffs, but they decided not to have that due to legacy compatibility issue with existing []byte/string(which is actually just an immutable view on []byte) types.

So now the only hope is generics. I don't want to write hundreds of same list/map classes just to offer immutable views. That's all duplicated works, and I just want ability to write List and Map.

If you don't think immutable data structure or view is not important, Go is good enough to you. But that feature is crucial to me, and that's one of the biggest reason of why I stopped using Go.

Post reply on HN