Three Months of Go, from a Haskeller’s perspective (2016)
barrucadu.co.uk
Three Months of Go, from a Haskeller’s perspective (2016)
1–10 of 363 posts
Re: Three Months of Go, from a Haskeller’s perspective (2016)
#2I hate to sound like the rust evangelist strike force... I really do. But your complaints are exactly what it would solve... Sigh I hate to say this I really do. But here goes...
So have you checked out rust?
Re: Three Months of Go, from a Haskeller’s perspective (2016)
#3> Go is just too different to how I think: when I approach a programming problem, I first think about the types and abstractions that will be useful; I think about statically enforcing behaviour
I see statements like this a lot from Haskellers and I think its overstated. Anecdotally, after going from Python to spending 3-4 years in Haskell then going back to a dynamic language (Elixir) I've come to the conclusion that how you think when programming is very much a learned trait that works for that language. It's neither good or bad, but it's educational nonetheless. Haskell and other languages like it forces you to have a very unique mindset that can overpower previously learned languages not like it. And it's in no way permanent.
After I stopped using Haskell I was like "ugh, I need types! wth!". I wanted to go back to Haskell only out of familiarity, but as I continued after a short while I wasn't even thinking like that anymore. The thought rarely occurred. I stopped thinking in Haskell and started thinking in Elixir.
Re: Three Months of Go, from a Haskeller’s perspective (2016)
#4Pulling no punches:
Other than that, I will probably never choose to use Go for anything ever again, unless I’m being paid for it. Go is just too different to how I think: when I approach a programming problem, I first think about the types and abstractions that will be useful; I think about statically enforcing behaviour; and I don’t worry about the cost of intermediary data structures, because that price is almost never paid in full.
Wow.
Re: Three Months of Go, from a Haskeller’s perspective (2016)
#5> There is no way to specify a version [of an imported package]
You can do this in your version-control system (e.g. git), via a process called "vendoring". It's ugly but, using one of the popular tools, quite workable.
Re: Three Months of Go, from a Haskeller’s perspective (2016)
#6I feel like some of the criticism is unwarranted, specifically:
> The tooling is bad
I feel like the tooling is really impressive, considering the age of the language. Remember that Haskell is something like 25+ years old. Go has done quite a bit in short time - I can only hope it will get better too.
> Zero values are almost never what you want
I've always felt the defaults to be spot on. Anyway, it's my responsibility to initialise these values, even on struct fields.
> A culture of “backwards compatibility at all costs”
I agree the current (package management) landscape is dire, but this should change, hopefully this year, with godep. As it is now, I have found success using glide for dependency management, so that's what I would recommend for now.
Apart from that, I can agree on a lot of things - I'm specifically annoyed by the whole generics thing, the way I interpret the people involved with the project is "it would be nice to have, but the implementation is awkward, so we won't admit to it being nice to have".
Re: Three Months of Go, from a Haskeller’s perspective (2016)
#7TL;DR: "Go isn't like Haskell, and that means it's not as good"
I get that we all have favourite languages, but it is not amazingly helpful to try and compare them like this, for me. I'm sure if you're a Haskeller and you're eyeing up Go, being forewarned might be helpful, but here's another idea:
Don't compare. Just use. Take it at face value. Figure out what becomes easy, what becomes hard.
I came at Go from 10+ years of professional Ruby development, and it was a tough punch to the stomach at times. I still think in Ruby more often than I think in Go. But I know the two aren't really comparable for most things.
Re: Three Months of Go, from a Haskeller’s perspective (2016)
#8It is, I think, going to be very difficult to enjoy writing code in a less powerful language when you are exposed to languages that hold awesome power.
In fact, this has been the basis for much writing on Lisp too. Paul Graham has written entire essays along the same lines.
If you work in a job that forces the use of a less powerful language than what you've been exposed to, you can, I think, go through a sort of depression. You simply long to use the tools that you know hold much more power yet must resign yourself to the tools you have.
You can overcome the problem by being present in your work. The language might be ugly. It might be totally underpowered with limited means of abstraction and a type system that snmacks you and, sometimes, your client over the head. What you can do is, despite that, commit to writing great software with the tools you have. Commit to improving your work. Perhaps expand the ecosystem with tools borne of insights from your adventures with high-powered tools.
You will have a much more enjoyable time in most languages this way. Perhaps except MUMPS but there might be hope.
Re: Three Months of Go, from a Haskeller’s perspective (2016)
#9I don't think anything in the 'The Bad' is unfair, and they're certainly not written from a position of ignorance.
Those are things that suck about go; it's not specifically that they suck about go when compared to haskell; they just generally suck (particularly the type system stuff).
However, I don't think that the situation is so bad I would go as far as to say, "Other than that, I will probably never choose to use Go for anything ever again..."
I maintain that while go might not give smart programmers the flexibility to express their FP dreams, it has a grungy practicality both for developing and maintaining code that is quite effective.
Introducing go and building applications with it in a team is easy because its quick to pick up for the whole team, regardless of background, its simple to use and its (relatively) difficult to shoot yourself in the foot in terms of distributing binaries or developing applications that run at modest scale.
When gogland (the IDE by jetbrains) comes out of EAP, it'll even have a modestly good professional IDE with integrated debugger (no atom, you don't count when your debugger never works on any platform).
...but hey, if you don't like it, don't use it.
Haskell is pretty great too.
Re: Three Months of Go, from a Haskeller’s perspective (2016)
#10Offtop: what kind of static website generator did he use? Looks clean, looking for something similar for my usage.