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Four days of Go

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Re: Four days of Go

#81

Post by stock_toaster »

smt88 wrote: post #77
jfaucett wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

I think you left off the key part of his point, namely "when recursively parsing unknown json data structures".

json parsing in Go uses reflection, which not only means it is slow, but if your input is not consistent (like say.. a log file with 20 different possible formats), it can be quite painful and very verbose.

Re: Four days of Go

#83

Post by nemothekid »

adrusi wrote: post #66
howeyc wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is part of it, some of the hate comes from people that "know better" (possibly true for some, obviously the Go authors aren't omnipotent) than the Go language designers and are baffled that the language design ideas they know about aren't in the language. But I can tell you in my experience that this type of forceful "everything is a error, no warnings" and "it is done this way (formatting for instance)"…

In before "but adding generics does not make team projects harder, look at language ..." Your (and many other people's) insistence on dismissing discussion regarding generics as some kind of a joke is anti-intellectual. You're rejecting valid criticism of your arguments on the basis that the critic's argument is unworthy of attention for some reason external to the discussion at hand. I agree that pro-generics argume…

I don't even get the vitriol against generics - the designers have only taken a "not now" approach to the subject and everyone acts as if Go is a social experiment to get everyone mad about generics.

Then people bring Rust, which has only had a stable grammar for last couple months and a standard library nowhere near Gos. Would it be wise to complain that the Rust stdlib doesn't contain a HTTP server implementation?

Re: Four days of Go

#84

Post by mike_hearn »

MetaCosm wrote: post #26
mike_hearn wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Go is developed inside Google where all dependencies are checked into their global version control repository. There are literally no versions inside the Google codebase - everything is compiled at head. If you want to upgrade a third party library then you are expected to globally upgrade every user of it .... simply bumping the version of a widely used library can thus turn into a multi-month promotion worthy proje…

> If you want to upgrade a third party library then you are expected to globally upgrade every user of it .... simply bumping the version of a widely used library can thus turn into a multi-month promotion worthy project! The alternative is of course supporting dozens or hundreds of copies of a library and every possible commit hash of said library. I contracted at a python shop that had 81 versions of a single libra…

Yes, I didn't pass judgement on the approach. It works well enough for Google and avoids problems with e.g. ELF symbol conflicts. For development out on the open internet you do need some way to specify versions so it's a puzzling lack, but "if it works for Google it works for you" does seem to be a recurring theme in the Go design.

Re: Four days of Go

#85

Post by wwweston »

jlebrech wrote: post #8

no ternary is a smart move tho. makes code more readable for all skill levels.

I'm completely baffled that people find the ternary operator difficult to scan.

The concept is simple. The syntax can be terse, but it doesn't have to be. Modestly capable Excel users take advantage of something just like it.

The only time I've ever seen it become difficult is when either the conditional or result expressions get hairy or depend on undescriptive variable names. And when that's the case, well, you're going to have the same problem with the expressions in your if/else, albeit spread out over a few more lines by convention (which one could do with a ternary expression just as well).

I'm at the point where I suspect complaints about the ternary operator are a cargo cult repetition thing, and the developers who are scared of it are scared because they were either taught by someone else to be scared, or they're suffering from a confirmation bias problem where they notice confusing conditionals more when they're associated with the operator.

Re: Four days of Go

#86

Post by Scarbutt »

nemothekid wrote: post #83
adrusi wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In before "but adding generics does not make team projects harder, look at language ..." Your (and many other people's) insistence on dismissing discussion regarding generics as some kind of a joke is anti-intellectual. You're rejecting valid criticism of your arguments on the basis that the critic's argument is unworthy of attention for some reason external to the discussion at hand. I agree that pro-generics argume…

I don't even get the vitriol against generics - the designers have only taken a "not now" approach to the subject and everyone acts as if Go is a social experiment to get everyone mad about generics. Then people bring Rust, which has only had a stable grammar for last couple months and a standard library nowhere near Gos. Would it be wise to complain that the Rust stdlib doesn't contain a HTTP server implementation?

Rust's stdlib not containing a HTTP server is a deliberate act.

Re: Four days of Go

#87

Post by mike_hearn »

jkyle wrote: post #45
howeyc wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is part of it, some of the hate comes from people that "know better" (possibly true for some, obviously the Go authors aren't omnipotent) than the Go language designers and are baffled that the language design ideas they know about aren't in the language. But I can tell you in my experience that this type of forceful "everything is a error, no warnings" and "it is done this way (formatting for instance)"…

> 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'd also say that many of these things are trivially fixed in other languages using tools. Most big projects have some code style guidelines which can be enforced using a linter and any good Java IDE can auto-clean imports lists for you at commit time (IntelliJ can be configured to auto-optimise imports just before commits for instance).

Making the compiler super strict about it seems like a good way to make quick changes awkward. Especially when there isn't a strong debugger you often end up commenting bits of code out or adding "return true" type statements half way down functions, and it's annoying when the compiler refuses to let you do it. This is one of the things that bugs me about javac - if it detects dead code in a function it refuses to compile. Maybe I'm weird but in my work this has caught legitimate dead code exactly zero times, but has triggered false positives due to transient debugging changes eleventy bazillion times. Luckily javac is dumb and you can trick it by just writing the code as "if (true) return;"

Re: Four days of Go

#88

Post by rootbear »

Retra wrote: post #69
serve_yay wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's just syntactic sugar for if-else though, so it's right in the sweet spot of "doesn't make a big difference either way" and "is subject to preference" that makes it a prime target for bikeshedding. Personally I don't like the ternaries either, typically the syntax is ugly, but the if-else seems only slightly better to me.

Here's how you should use ternary: return (isblue ? "Blue" : "Red");

My evil twin wants to do this some day:

(pickfunc? func1: func2)(pickarg? arg1: arg2);

Works great!

Re: Four days of Go

#90

Post by ori_b »

Scarbutt wrote: post #86
nemothekid wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't even get the vitriol against generics - the designers have only taken a "not now" approach to the subject and everyone acts as if Go is a social experiment to get everyone mad about generics. Then people bring Rust, which has only had a stable grammar for last couple months and a standard library nowhere near Gos. Would it be wise to complain that the Rust stdlib doesn't contain a HTTP server implementation?

Rust's stdlib not containing a HTTP server is a deliberate act.

Go not including generics is a deliberate act.
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