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Four days of Go

evanmiller.org

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Re: Four days of Go

#71

Post by coldtea »

tormeh wrote: post #33
jerf wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Go's goto is the standard structured-programming-limited goto which is not allowed to violate blocks, which means it is not the goto that is "considered harmful". Go's "pointers" are not allowed to do pointer arithmetic, which basically means that they are references. As they are also backed by a garbage collector, this means you can't do any of the nasty C things you can do with them, not even "fail to deallocate" t…

Goto's create unreadable code and are unnecessary. They're there to encourage the writing of bad code. You can pass a pointer over a goroutine channel. That's my main issue with them, beside the fact that we should be past this needless complication of our code. Again, they're unnecessary and encourage bad code.

>Goto's create unreadable code and are unnecessary. They're there to encourage the writing of bad code.

That's the old wives tale about gotos. Mostly repeated by freshment that heard gotos are bad, don't understand fully when and why they are bad, and repeat it as cargo cult gospel.

Re: Four days of Go

#72

Post by zellyn »

Great article. However, I would not assume that us (good programmers) vs them (bad ones) is how the go folks see the world. If a couple decades of programming have taught me anything, it's that "them" is usually "me" or "past me" or "500 of us".

Re: Four days of Go

#73

Post by lobster_johnson »

lmm wrote: post #68
jkyle wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Go makes coordinating with them a lot easier. What I like about strongly opinionated languages in general is that most of the strong opinions are around trivial features of the languages relative to the complexity of a decently interesting programming problem. Features like formatting, no unused imports, etc. These are typically areas in a project where Parkinson's Law of Triviality rears its ugly head in project p…

I agree with a lot of these (and would be interested in adopting a language that followed them - but one with a decent type system), but I don't think that's the Go innovation. Python had opinions about whitespace and never attracted the same level of hate.

Python's whitespace has arguably produced metric tons of heated discussion on the net since Python's inception. Back in the day it was often the main thing outsiders (jwz comes to mind) rejected.

Re: Four days of Go

#75

Post by 0xdeadbeefbabe »

scott_s wrote: post #55
zerr wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, I thought it was clear - incompetence regarding [modern] language design. They don't deny this neither. And it seems they're even proud of this. > when you're an anonymous internet user It is easy to be honest, yes.

I don't think your amended statement is much better. They have designed a language that meets their goals. They have decided not to include many things, but that does not mean that they are not aware of them, or are incompetent for doing so.

Right, and what zerr calls incompetence could also be called post-modernism.

Re: Four days of Go

#76

Post by BinaryIdiot »

oblio wrote: post #59
jgrahamc wrote: post #2

In other words, Go represents a kind of Machiavellian power play, orchestrated by slow-and-careful programmers who are tired of suffering for the sins of fast-and-loose programmers. The Go documentation refers quite often to intolerable 45-minute build times suffered by the original designers, and I can’t help but imagine them sitting around and seething about all those unused imports from those “other” programmers,…

An involuntarily funny quote from the article: > Their solution was not to engage and educate those programmers to change their habits. I wish the blog author good luck in educating masses of programmers, even smart ones :)

It's certainly difficult; every time I have to tell someone their opinion is wrong they get defensive. Look, I'm just trying to educate you. I'm right so let's just end it at that. :)

Re: Four days of Go

#77

Post by smt88 »

jfaucett wrote: post #60
jgrahamc wrote: post #2

In other words, Go represents a kind of Machiavellian power play, orchestrated by slow-and-careful programmers who are tired of suffering for the sins of fast-and-loose programmers. The Go documentation refers quite often to intolerable 45-minute build times suffered by the original designers, and I can’t help but imagine them sitting around and seething about all those unused imports from those “other” programmers,…

Personally, I think people dislike Go because they try using it for tasks where it makes their life miserable. Mainly for web programming. (unless of course you're a masochist and enjoy not having a repl and want static typing and a compilation step when recursively parsing unknown json data structures). In my experience, Go is a tool thats really good for a certain set of programming tasks and like all other languag…

> unless of course you're a masochist and ... want static typing

Some people say to prototype in a dynamically-typed language and then switch to a static language later. Dynamic typing might save keystrokes, but typecasting and type-checking do require lots of typing, and who cares that much about a few hundred extra keystrokes anyway?

Some people say to create whole, large apps in dynamically-typed languages, but those people clearly haven't tried modifying or debugging code bases in those languages that weren't created with utmost discipline and 100% test coverage.

So with 10 years of web programming experience, I'd emphatically argue that masochism is not using static typing.

I have warm, happy dreams of a future where there's a great alternative to the dynamic/weak web languages of today. There are already some great entrants, but nothing has reached the massive popularity of existing languages yet.

(Edited for clarity)

Re: Four days of Go

#79

Post by jasonlotito »

> If I had to guess, I’d say the Go gopher suffers from a mild form of autism.

> I get the same feeling about the Go language. It feels like it is designed by an obsessive personality — obsessed with build times in particular, but also having an obsession with detail, someone who rarely makes mistakes when writing code, who generally will not run code until it appears to be complete and correct.

WTF? Not only is it insulting, it's ignorant. Considering some of the other comments here regarding how "excellent" this article is, it clearly doesn't concern many when casual insults are allowed.

No no, let's applaud someone for making casual, racist-like remarks without even questioning it. If this is considered quality, we should be ashamed.

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