I Want Off Mr. Golang's Wild Ride • Hacker News Board

Re: I Want Off Mr. Golang's Wild Ride

#121

Post by Liru » Fri, Feb 28, 2020, 5:46 PM UTC

My most popular project on Github is currently a program I slapped together in Go a long time ago. The `sync/atomic` issue mentioned at the end of the article is THE issue that made me stop considering Go for anything other than trivial things. Lack of decent error handling, a terrible builtin json library, constant `interface{}` to poorly substitute for generics, the package management issues that made Node.js look well-thought-out by comparison, struct field tags, and generators provided by the core team that set off linters provided by the core team with no good way to silence them kind of piled on before that, but the `atomic` issue is the one that made me avoid it. The author is right, all the little things add up.

Note that a bunch of these may have been fixed since I last used it, but honestly, I haven't checked because it was frustrating working in it and debugging it. It's a shame, `pprof` and the race detector are pretty cool.

Re: I Want Off Mr. Golang's Wild Ride

#122

Post by msla » Fri, Feb 28, 2020, 5:47 PM UTC

marcus_holmes wrote: post #96

fasterthanlime wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Author here - I apologize for pulling Rust into this, but for the life of me couldn't find any comparable language that solves those problems "the right way". I tried really hard. I knew a lot of people would instantly have that reaction, but I couldn't find another way to show that there is another way , short of pulling it out of thin air (which would've made for an even longer, less accessible article).

LISP, surely? all HN knows that LISP is the perfect programming language... ;)

If only because Lisp is a moving target, so practically anything you say about it will be true by someone's definition.

Re: I Want Off Mr. Golang's Wild Ride

#123

Post by maximente » Fri, Feb 28, 2020, 5:47 PM UTC

gameswithgo wrote: post #18

A lot of people seem to be missing an overarching point, which is the benefits of a language having Sum types, so that edge cases can be represented clearly, and in a way where the consumer of the api can't fail to know they exist, and can't fail to handle them. Anyone thinking of making a new language today, should really get some familiarity with Option and Result types. They make so many things not only safer, but…

that's true, but realize that golang is largely shepherded forward by a company with a legacy of C++ (maybe lesser C/java) heritage. you aren't getting legacy C++ programmers on board with "optional" types: they'll riot and pull the purity card (this doesn't look like "my C++"). google is probably grateful these people are no longer returning -1, -2 etc. for errors from their functions.

consider things like the golang date formatting string. to anyone not well versed in a C++/C ecosystem, the golang date formatting string is absolutely nuts. it is complicated as hell and doesn't really make any sense. but consider the reaction of a C++/C developer: they're probably quite comfortable with it, because it's basically stolen from C. functions like itoa and atoi harken back to a """simpler""" time, despite being virtually nondescript for anyone who didn't start their careers with that stuff.

Re: I Want Off Mr. Golang's Wild Ride

#124

Post by iudqnolq » Fri, Feb 28, 2020, 5:50 PM UTC

fasterthanlime wrote: post #93

skywhopper wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, the author misunderstands the naming scheme which actually suggests this sort of repetition. See also, io/ioutil.

My mistake, I removed the relevant paragraph in the article.

I still see it, maybe cached?

Re: I Want Off Mr. Golang's Wild Ride

#125

Post by terminaljunkid » Fri, Feb 28, 2020, 5:50 PM UTC

TL;DR I am on Windows and Go doesn't play well with its weird filesystem. It is all Go's fault for relying on highly used server OS semantics and therefore Go's simplicity is lie.

Re: I Want Off Mr. Golang's Wild Ride

#126

Post by steveklabnik » Fri, Feb 28, 2020, 5:51 PM UTC

maximente wrote: post #123

gameswithgo wrote: post #18

A lot of people seem to be missing an overarching point, which is the benefits of a language having Sum types, so that edge cases can be represented clearly, and in a way where the consumer of the api can't fail to know they exist, and can't fail to handle them. Anyone thinking of making a new language today, should really get some familiarity with Option and Result types. They make so many things not only safer, but…

that's true, but realize that golang is largely shepherded forward by a company with a legacy of C++ (maybe lesser C/java) heritage. you aren't getting legacy C++ programmers on board with "optional" types: they'll riot and pull the purity card (this doesn't look like "my C++"). google is probably grateful these people are no longer returning -1, -2 etc. for errors from their functions. consider things like the golan…

C++ has been adding things like optional types; std::optional was released in C++17, there's talk of maybe pattern matching coming soon...

Re: I Want Off Mr. Golang's Wild Ride

#127

Post by terminaljunkid » Fri, Feb 28, 2020, 5:52 PM UTC

delusional wrote: post #94

gameswithgo wrote: post #18

A lot of people seem to be missing an overarching point, which is the benefits of a language having Sum types, so that edge cases can be represented clearly, and in a way where the consumer of the api can't fail to know they exist, and can't fail to handle them. Anyone thinking of making a new language today, should really get some familiarity with Option and Result types. They make so many things not only safer, but…

It's curious that after pretty universally rejecting checked exceptions, they have now returned as result.

People are quick to advocate anything from functional programming / academia here. Doesn't mean it would necessarily improve life of an ordinary programmer.

Re: I Want Off Mr. Golang's Wild Ride

#128

Post by shadowgovt » Fri, Feb 28, 2020, 5:52 PM UTC

It's a pretty good article. The tl;dr is that golang is a POSIX-focused application programming language that is incorrectly advertised as a platform-agnostic systems programming language.

Re: I Want Off Mr. Golang's Wild Ride

#129

Post by hota_mazi » Fri, Feb 28, 2020, 5:52 PM UTC

Thaxll wrote: post #60

"With a Go function, if you ignore the returned error, you still get the result - most probably a null pointer." Well you should handle the error in the first place.

The language should make you handle the error and the compiler should refuse to compile your code until you have done so.

Re: I Want Off Mr. Golang's Wild Ride

#130

Post by madhadron » Fri, Feb 28, 2020, 5:53 PM UTC

skrebbel wrote: post #67

madhadron wrote: post #64

> The Go way is to half-ass things. This used to be known as the New Jersey school, and is the underlying philosophy of Unix: build a bunch of little pieces that work a lot of the time and kind of fit together if you remember the gotchas, then call it a day. There is an essay on this that I am unable to locate right now which mentions the horror of someone working on ITS when they asked how Unix solved a rollback on…

Sounds like it might be straight from the original "worse is better" essay: http://dreamsongs.com/RiseOfWorseIsBetter.html > The MIT guy did not see any code that handled this case and asked the New Jersey guy how the problem was handled. The New Jersey guy said that the Unix folks were aware of the problem, but the solution was for the system routine to always finish, but sometimes an error code would be returned th…

Oh, of course. Thank you!