Why Go gets criticized so much • Hacker News Board

Re: Why Go gets criticized so much

#131

Post by dkersten » Fri, Apr 08, 2016, 3:35 PM UTC

jb613 wrote: post #78

sievebrain wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Selling points are not facts, they're just arguments people who are trying to sell something like to make. Go's users and designers make all sorts of claims about it. As it happens, I've evaluated them and find that I often disagree with them. For instance, Go projects often don't specify the versions of their dependencies and choose to just clone the code into their own source tree instead - if you're lucky. If you…

"Selling points are not facts" except when talking about maintainability, you are not talking about facts. Show me the "fact" that Go is hard to maintain.

The burden of proof is on the people making the "selling points" to prove that they are true -- in this case, if the Go community claim that Go is easy to maintain, the burden of proof should be on them.

(Note: I'm not arguing for or against this point; I've never used Go, so couldn't possibly know)

Re: Why Go gets criticized so much

#132

Post by joeblau » Fri, Apr 08, 2016, 3:36 PM UTC

Lewisham wrote: post #110

Disclaimer: I work at El Goog. I recently moved teams so that I could use Go exclusively. It's often been said that Go solves the problems Google developers have, and it's 110% true. It's much easier to get things working, and it's much easier to write things like Protocol Buffers. But the key for me is that Go isn't fun in the sense of "wow, I'm so smart that I managed to one line this thing", it's fun in the "wow I…

  >  It's often been said that Go solves the problems Google developers have, and
  >  it's 110% true.

I'm wondering how much of what you're experiencing is "Good Go" vs "Bad Java"? I feel like you can take any project in any language and screw it up pretty badly. I'm an iOS developer and I've seen developers bring questionable practices that aren't consistent with the Objective-C ecosystem in and cause all sorts of confusion. I'm sure there are a few other languages that would give you the same positive experience if you tried them out.

Re: Why Go gets criticized so much

#133

Post by spriggan3 » Fri, Apr 08, 2016, 3:36 PM UTC

I don't hate Go. I think the language is half what it could have been if designed more carefully. I don't doubt Go designers skills, I just think they just stopped half way for various reasons. Which makes Go a bit frustrating.

However, I hate the Go community, which doesn't hesitate to humiliate people trying to use language in unconventional ways (Martini...) and mock people that come with a valid criticism of the language (rigid type system, lack of dynamic linking, package management...).

So good language despite its flaws, horrible community. Now is it useful? It'd be like asking if Python is useful despite its flaws, yet Python has a great community unlike Go.

Re: Why Go gets criticized so much

#134

Post by fixermark » Fri, Apr 08, 2016, 3:36 PM UTC

Lewisham wrote: post #110

Disclaimer: I work at El Goog. I recently moved teams so that I could use Go exclusively. It's often been said that Go solves the problems Google developers have, and it's 110% true. It's much easier to get things working, and it's much easier to write things like Protocol Buffers. But the key for me is that Go isn't fun in the sense of "wow, I'm so smart that I managed to one line this thing", it's fun in the "wow I…

I agree with your take on this. Part of language arguments roots in the "assumptions of the Blub Paradox": that there exists some strict ordering among languages (and therefore some language "blub" that is superior to some and inferior to others).

I find this hypothesis questionable. It's likely that language "power" in the real world looks more like a loosely-ordered graph, with plenty of bidirectionals tagged with things like "If you are doing lots of matrix algebra" or "If you need the thing to run on a Raspberry Pi." Go solves a specific domain I operate in (data structure transformation and web services) really quite well---well enough that I can move from making the problem fit the language to solving the problem with small amounts of work, without worrying that I'll create a testing nightmare for myself in the future.

When I find a task too big for Go, I'll amend my feelings on the issue.

Re: Why Go gets criticized so much

#135

Post by Cshelton » Fri, Apr 08, 2016, 3:37 PM UTC

Lewisham wrote: post #110

Disclaimer: I work at El Goog. I recently moved teams so that I could use Go exclusively. It's often been said that Go solves the problems Google developers have, and it's 110% true. It's much easier to get things working, and it's much easier to write things like Protocol Buffers. But the key for me is that Go isn't fun in the sense of "wow, I'm so smart that I managed to one line this thing", it's fun in the "wow I…

> "wow I read this code and I can understand what's happening and hack on it to do something else."

I think that's the issue. For many things, that is perfectly fine. But for other stuff (finance, healthcare, safety critical, anything that loses real money/lives when it breaks), the last thing I want is somebody to just "hack on to it".

Re: Why Go gets criticized so much

#136

Post by fixermark » Fri, Apr 08, 2016, 3:37 PM UTC

joeblau wrote: post #132

Lewisham wrote: post #110

Disclaimer: I work at El Goog. I recently moved teams so that I could use Go exclusively. It's often been said that Go solves the problems Google developers have, and it's 110% true. It's much easier to get things working, and it's much easier to write things like Protocol Buffers. But the key for me is that Go isn't fun in the sense of "wow, I'm so smart that I managed to one line this thing", it's fun in the "wow I…

> It's often been said that Go solves the problems Google developers have, and > it's 110% true. I'm wondering how much of what you're experiencing is "Good Go" vs "Bad Java"? I feel like you can take any project in any language and screw it up pretty badly. I'm an iOS developer and I've seen developers bring questionable practices that aren't consistent with the Objective-C ecosystem in and cause all sorts of confus…

It's possible that Go hasn't been around long enough for anyone to screw it up badly. But that'd be a strength in the ecosystem of languages.

Re: Why Go gets criticized so much

#137

Post by k__ » Fri, Apr 08, 2016, 3:37 PM UTC

I never used Go, but the main issues seemed to me that Google promised a C/C++ alternative and failed. Instead they made a Ruby/Node.js alternative.

I mean, telling C/C++ devs GC is the hit and parametric polymorphism suck? What did they expect...

Don't know if I'm right, but that's the gist I got from all the comments and news about Go.

Re: Why Go gets criticized so much

#138

Post by EugeneOZ » Fri, Apr 08, 2016, 3:38 PM UTC

Lewisham wrote: post #110

Disclaimer: I work at El Goog. I recently moved teams so that I could use Go exclusively. It's often been said that Go solves the problems Google developers have, and it's 110% true. It's much easier to get things working, and it's much easier to write things like Protocol Buffers. But the key for me is that Go isn't fun in the sense of "wow, I'm so smart that I managed to one line this thing", it's fun in the "wow I…

Huh, funny enough - Go was my first try to replace PHP, but as I don't share opinion "copy-paste is better than generics" and "executable comments are ok", I tried Rust, and now I have REST API with 10000+ LOC - it serves multiple web apps and works just awesome and I really feel fun of programming and I'm enjoying language. So "I don't know why you'd want to write a web app in Rust" sounds ridiculous for me. Really, "I don't know why you'd want to write a web app in Go".

Re: Why Go gets criticized so much

#139

Post by heinrich5991 » Fri, Apr 08, 2016, 3:38 PM UTC

falcolas wrote: post #41

JulianMorrison wrote: post #22

Why would anyone think Go and Rust are bitter rivals? They're great tools for different things, with a broad margin of overlap.

Ultimately, they share a space - compiled, memory safe, and aimed at server-side development. The way they differ is mostly in how they approach memory safety, which gives them different performance characteristics.

Rust isn't solely aimed at server space: E.g. we have servo, a browser engine.

Re: Why Go gets criticized so much

#140

Post by qihqi » Fri, Apr 08, 2016, 3:38 PM UTC

Lewisham wrote: post #110

Disclaimer: I work at El Goog. I recently moved teams so that I could use Go exclusively. It's often been said that Go solves the problems Google developers have, and it's 110% true. It's much easier to get things working, and it's much easier to write things like Protocol Buffers. But the key for me is that Go isn't fun in the sense of "wow, I'm so smart that I managed to one line this thing", it's fun in the "wow I…

Indeed Go is a pretty good "Google Language". It almost google's C++ with it's C style guide baked into the language. For almost every feature in Go (or lack of thereof), I can find a line in the C style guide saying the very same thing. (ban of exceptions, rvalue references, don't include what you don't use, CHECK vs. panick... etc)

(Though yet many teams didn't adopt Go. Because if none of your teammembers has Go readability then you have to rely on someone in Go team to do CRs. Those guys are not very pleasant to deal with.)