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Go Lang: Comments Are Not Directives

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Re: Go Lang: Comments Are Not Directives

#51

Post by NateDad »

zak_mc_kracken wrote: post #12
enneff wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Go generate is just sweeping issues under the carpet and say to developers "it has been dealt with", which is ,at the minimum, insulting. Nobody expects a language to be perfect, but sometimes I feel the Go team takes devs for idiots with half baked solutions. That's absolutely a mischaracterisation, and a hurtful one at that because we absolutely care about our developer experience. "go generate" is a mechanism fo…

> Our conservatism should be a testament to how much we care about quality. Offering code generation as a solution to code reuse is not caring about quality, it's laziness.

Fixing the lack of generics is not the intent of supporting a standard way to do code generation. The intent is to allow for things like generating code from protobuf specs and yacc. In fact, there was even debate against adding go:generate because they were afraid people would use it to get something like generics. To say it is for generics is to grossly mischaracterize the feature.

Re: Go Lang: Comments Are Not Directives

#52

Post by NateDad »

saintfiends wrote: post #25

Partially agreed. Directives should be visually distinct from comments and syntax should be formally defined such that compilers, code generators, editors and IDE's can use them consistently.

The compiler doesn't need to care about these directives. They don't have anything to do with the compiler. That's half the reason they're in comments. Otherwise you're just adding another kind of comment the compiler has to also ignore.

The directives are pretty visually distinct. You could easily configure your editor to highlight them differently if you so chose.

Re: Go Lang: Comments Are Not Directives

#53

Post by Merkur »

erikb wrote: post #43

What does the word directive mean? Doing stuff by parsing comments is called a macro processor (or preprocessor, but it doesn't have to be done before the actual processing) or not? I think there are many instances where macro processors are a good thing. Some languages have them in the core. So what's the difference between macros and directives?

I would define a directive as an instruction to the tool chain.

A macro processor could be one of those tools in the chain. There could be other (and Go implements other use cases!)

I would also argue that a macro preprocessor do'snt need to "parse comments", it could parse any syntax the preprocessor wants to (and remove it from source befor the compiler sees it) In fact my point is, that parsing comments at all is a very bad idea.

But my argument is NOT about, if Go needs a macro processor, or not. (i think it dont!) My argument is about the syntax of the directive.

I argue about the syntax of declaring "Here comes something that is not Go Language!" I argue that this syntax should not be a comment - because a comment is part of the Go Language. (...among other reasons i stated in this discussion)

Re: Go Lang: Comments Are Not Directives

#54

Post by Dewie3 »

marcus_holmes wrote: post #17

At last! I'm not insane! I raised this on the golang dev forums and got nowhere: https://groups.google.com/d/msg/golang-dev/r4rdPdsH1Fg/yjOOz... The response was basically "we disagree" and I wandered away feeling confused that so many bright people couldn't see the problem here.

> The response was basically "we disagree" and I wandered away feeling confused that so many bright people couldn't see the problem here.

I don't see why that's so hard to imagine. Just because someone is skilled/bright in some area doesn't mean that they are skilled/have good taste in another area. Even if those areas are very similar from a high-level view, like both involving programming.

There has been a lot of appeal to authority with regards to the Go designers/developers - basically that they have a long track record of making great/influential software. And though appealing to authority certainly isn't without merit, I think it was taken a bit far, namely that it was used as an argument to try to end all discussion. And secondly the things that they are famous for does not seem to be related to PL/design.

Re: Go Lang: Comments Are Not Directives

#55

Post by donatj »

I honestly even feel weird about godoc just being standard comments, in my mind docs and comments are different things, docs usually being noted with / * * (no spaces, but can't figure out how to escape) and comments being /* // or #

Re: Go Lang: Comments Are Not Directives

#57

Post by tmaly »

eis wrote: post #14
TheDong wrote: post #8

Want to know what's even worse? Using comments for something but not parsing the syntax tree . In go 1.4, save the following to a file and run 'go generate' on it: https://play.golang.org/p/9WJtxClRXr (I'd make it run in the playground, but you can't 'fork exec', so exec.Command($GOBIN, generate) won't work sadly) Even though that code has no comments (only a multi-line string), go generate will run and print out a '…

That's pretty bad. I think the reason why people are so upset/surprised is because they expect better from the Go team. Sometimes it really feels like they take the lazy route without putting enough thought and polish into things. Which is amplified by the previous statements regarding for example generics where they said they wont introduce them until they find a really good way to do it but then crank out half bake…

I have been using Perl for a long time, it did not get everything right when it first rolled out its object system. Through incremental improvements and backward compatibility the language has become very stable. Go is just getting to 1.5, so I expect it to have some issues at the beginning.

Re: Go Lang: Comments Are Not Directives

#58

Post by andrewchambers »

coldtea wrote: post #32
eis wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's pretty bad. I think the reason why people are so upset/surprised is because they expect better from the Go team. Sometimes it really feels like they take the lazy route without putting enough thought and polish into things. Which is amplified by the previous statements regarding for example generics where they said they wont introduce them until they find a really good way to do it but then crank out half bake…

> I think the reason why people are so upset/surprised is because they expect better from the Go team. Sometimes it really feels like they take the lazy route without putting enough thought and polish into things. I think that was the case with Go from the start. Can you think of some aspect that was especially well thought-out?

Go has the best and most consistent std library I have seen.

Re: Go Lang: Comments Are Not Directives

#59

Post by andrewchambers »

xyproto wrote: post #35
lohengramm wrote: post #30

I also do not agree with that. This is bad for so many reasons. First, to the compiler code, comments should be discarded as soon as possible (often in the lexer). To the programmers, comments should never execute anything (this is just intuitively expected). To any go source code reader (human or machine), comments are supposed to contain only human readable text, probably a context sensitive explanation of that par…

Fully agree. I love Go and use it for anything related to servers or the web, but doing anything with comments besides just letting them be comments, is just braindead.

They aren't used by the compiler at all.

Re: Go Lang: Comments Are Not Directives

#60

Post by rattray »

enneff wrote: post #4
aikah wrote: post #2

I 100% agree. You want macros? I don't like it but think about proper macros. Go generate is just sweeping issues under the carpet and say to developers "it has been dealt with". Nobody expects a language to be perfect, but sometimes I feel the Go team takes devs for idiots with half baked solutions. So don't use comments for anything but documentation generation purpose. .

> Go generate is just sweeping issues under the carpet and say to developers "it has been dealt with", which is ,at the minimum, insulting. Nobody expects a language to be perfect, but sometimes I feel the Go team takes devs for idiots with half baked solutions. That's absolutely a mischaracterisation, and a hurtful one at that because we absolutely care about our developer experience. "go generate" is a mechanism fo…

(I regularly downvote comments that are negative, and leave comments explaining why I found the comment to be negative).

I actually don't think this was an unfair phrasing. I had actually felt insulted when `go generate` was announced. "You're sweeping [generics et al] under the rug using comment-bound directives and telling me it's an elegant solution to problems? Do you think I'm an idiot?" Was, in fact, very close to what went on in my head when I read that initial post/slideshow.

I don't like to be degrading when it comes to differing opinions on coding practices - if generated code and comment-bound directives are good for you, well, okay - but being told that I should like it and stop questioning? That's insulting.

I think the deeper complaint that's coming through is not that the Go team are bad language designers who don't care about the developer experience, but that they are condescending towards the community. Even if you really, really don't mean to be.

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