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Go by Example

gobyexample.com

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Re: Go by Example

#11

Post by JeanPierre »

sergiotapia wrote: post #10
hdevalence wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are there any plans to add generics yet, or do I still have to write a bunch of extra boilerplate functions in order to sort a list?

That's something for the Go creators to decide, but personally I enjoy the feeling of safety that comes with lack of generics. I have very few Go bugs at runtime and I think that explicitness plays a huge part in it.

Could you elaborate on how generics makes code less safe? In my experience, the lack of generics is much more type unsafe, as you often have to do casts at runtime (and handle them) when you have to implement your own data structures. In contrast, languages with generics handle those at compile time.

Re: Go by Example

#13

Post by hdevalence »

sergiotapia wrote: post #10
hdevalence wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are there any plans to add generics yet, or do I still have to write a bunch of extra boilerplate functions in order to sort a list?

That's something for the Go creators to decide, but personally I enjoy the feeling of safety that comes with lack of generics. I have very few Go bugs at runtime and I think that explicitness plays a huge part in it.

What? I'm talking about stuff like this, copied from the documentation:

    func (a ByAge) Len() int           { return len(a) }
    func (a ByAge) Swap(i, j int)      { a[i], a[j] = a[j], a[i] }
    func (a ByAge) Less(i, j int) bool { return a[i].Age
How does forcing me to type out (or copy-paste) an implementation of Swap increase safety? If anything, it just makes the code more error-prone.

And not having generics means that (as far as I can tell) people end up using a lot of `interface{}`. How does that increase safety?

More importantly, why would I want to use a language whose solution to the problem of "dealing with generic data" essentially boils down to "use a void*"?

Re: Go by Example

#14

Post by bsg75 »

hdevalence wrote: post #9
sergiotapia wrote: post #3

It's Friday gents! No excuse to set aside Saturday and Sunday, you can easily go through these examples in two days and grok it. Go is that _slim_, and that's good! Guaranteed you'll find use for Go in one system or the other when you want easy deployment, fast development time and extreme speeds. :) (Disclaimer: I love Go and I hope it goes mainstream in a big way in 5 years)

Are there any plans to add generics yet, or do I still have to write a bunch of extra boilerplate functions in order to sort a list?

What does yet another gripe about generics in Go have to do with a tutorial written by an independent party, one that is about features in the language today ?

Re: Go by Example

#16

Post by hdevalence »

bsg75 wrote: post #14
hdevalence wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are there any plans to add generics yet, or do I still have to write a bunch of extra boilerplate functions in order to sort a list?

What does yet another gripe about generics in Go have to do with a tutorial written by an independent party, one that is about features in the language today ?

It was in response mainly to:

> Go is that _slim_, and that's good! Guaranteed you'll find use for Go in one system or the other...

I'm all for learning new programming languages, but if you're going to learn a new programming language, why not use one that has new ideas?

Re: Go by Example

#18

Post by tokenizerrr »

pearkes wrote: post #8
tokenizerrr wrote: post #6

This documentation is great, but one thing I tend to miss with examples like these is how to structure a project, deal with packages, etc.

GitHub is your friend here. Here is a search for Go repositories with > 100 stars.[1] Every project will look different (the really big ones might be more complex then you need) but as you get deeper into the results you can find some great stuff. [1]: https://github.com/search?l=go&q=stars%3A%3E100&s=stars&type...

That's a great idea, I hadn't thought of that.

Re: Go by Example

#19

Post by nickik »

I am not personally interested in Go but I care about CSP. I will defently check out some of these CSP things and maybe try to recreate them in Clojure core.async.

Re: Go by Example

#20

Post by bsg75 »

hdevalence wrote: post #16
bsg75 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does yet another gripe about generics in Go have to do with a tutorial written by an independent party, one that is about features in the language today ?

It was in response mainly to: > Go is that _slim_, and that's good! Guaranteed you'll find use for Go in one system or the other... I'm all for learning new programming languages, but if you're going to learn a new programming language, why not use one that has new ideas?

Go does not have a lot of new features, but mostly a specific collection of convenient ones (static compilation, GC, etc.) Not sure how many new languages have truly new features, vs. how many are improvements in productivity (human and machine).

My point is that generics are not a new idea either, and plenty of languages offer them. Go is not meant (anymore) to replace C/C++/Java or even Rust. It will never have all the features of those, and probably should not.

But it seems impossible to have a HN discussion on Golang without part of the thread getting hijacked with "But generics!!!" This make no more sense to me than considering other languages incomplete because they don't generate static binaries.

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