Why Go gets criticized so much • Hacker News Board

Re: Why Go gets criticized so much

#141

Post by jb613 » Fri, Apr 08, 2016, 3:39 PM UTC

sievebrain wrote: post #88

jb613 wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

I never said code written in Go is hard to maintain. I said I don't want to maintain it, because I don't want to debug or write Go myself. You're arguing with a straw man.

the article is suggesting that when people say they don't want to debug or write in Go is because it challenges their previously formed beliefs in what they believe they need from a language. The fact that there may be another way or that projects are increasingly succeeding, challenges their identity.

Re: Why Go gets criticized so much

#142

Post by titzer » Fri, Apr 08, 2016, 3:40 PM UTC

glennsl wrote: post #100

sievebrain wrote: post #7

I don't hate Go. I do strongly dislike posts with clickbaity titles that have an admission the title is wrong in the very first sentence. The rest of the article is little better. It can be summed up in one line: People who dislike Go are upset because they incorporated their favourite programming language into their identity, and the success of Go challenges their own choices . Although I don't hate Go, I also don't…

I don't dislike Go. I just think there are zero use cases where Go is the best choice. But what I do dislike is when people try to hype and con others into adopting a language to justify and increase the return on their own time investment.

> But what I do dislike is when people try to hype and con others into adopting a language to justify and increase the return on their own time investment.

The same can be said of any programming language community, IMHO.

Re: Why Go gets criticized so much

#143

Post by sievebrain » Fri, Apr 08, 2016, 3:41 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…

The reason Google's Java codebase is impossible to understand is not the language, it's mindless application of 'best practices' like dependency injection on an industrial scale. Guice is open source, anyone can go look at it. Just imagine a big complex server in which the "new" keyword wasn't used anywhere because everything was handled by the dependency injector. You get these things:

1. Things that should be compile time errors turning into runtime errors.

2. An IDE that can't navigate anywhere or usefully analyze the code because everything has interfaces between it.

3. Things being mocked out in unit tests just because they can be, meaning lots of superfluous code and tests that pass when they should fail.

There's nothing about Java that mandates this style of programming. It's the result of years of programmers trying to be clever and finding ways to do things better without being sufficiently cynical about new trends and fashions. Given that Java is 20 years old, there has been plenty of time for people to find ways of making simple things complicated.

Go will suffer this phenomenon too because it's not to do with the languages themselves, it's to do with programmers who have safe corporate jobs finding ways to make themselves stand out from the pack by inventing and spreading 'best practices'. If anything, Go will suffer it worse, because the language itself is so limited, so there's more potential for bizarre hacks disguised as cleverness. Like that Go profiler that worked by rewriting source code to insert stuff between every single line of code.

Re: Why Go gets criticized so much

#144

Post by alexandrerond » Fri, Apr 08, 2016, 3:41 PM UTC

Seems most people don't understand that Golang is filling a niche that was not covered by anyone: fast, type safe, portable, memory-managed, simple.

Every language sucks at something. Switching from Ruby/Python to Golang feels like losing magic powers, yes, but some problems are better tackled without that magic and type safety comes as a plus.

Ruby/Python/C/Java/Scala/Erlang/Elixir/JS/Haskell/Lisp/Clojure/Rust all have different niches. We should really get over it.

Re: Why Go gets criticized so much

#145

Post by tankenmate » Fri, Apr 08, 2016, 3:41 PM UTC

pacala wrote: post #90

jb613 wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The lack of exceptions makes writing correct code really tedious." Tedious up front often translates into time saved down the road. Exceptions are often an easy way out while accruing future debt. Unfortunately, our industry cannot easily measure the time saved down the road and so cannot properly value it. However, many with long term interests in a project will often spend on the "tedious" costs up front to avoid…

> Exceptions are often an easy way out while accruing future debt. Is there perhaps a concrete illustration on how using exceptions causes technical debt, especially in a GCed language like Go?

GC means that most memory leaks cause by poor exception handling code are auto-magically fixed but it doesn't fix other resource leak problems; file handles, memory maps, locks, etc.

Re: Why Go gets criticized so much

#146

Post by xg15 » Fri, Apr 08, 2016, 3:42 PM UTC

I haven't used go so far and much of its criticism might be overblown - but to be honest, that article made me immediately dislike the author.

The basic argument of the article is that "People who dislike Go are upset because they incorporated their favourite programming language into their identity, and the success of Go challenges their own choices".

That can be summed up as "People who dislike Go do so because they have been hurt psychologically".

Apart from being disrespectful to the community of other languages, this basically makes it impossible to give a counter-argument: Whatever kind of argument you bring, in the end you would simply add support to the author's theory because, in fact, you have been trying to criticise the language, so you must be hurt. I don't see how that contributes to a fruitful discussion.

Re: Why Go gets criticized so much

#147

Post by fixermark » Fri, Apr 08, 2016, 3:42 PM UTC

gizmo wrote: post #28

I think there is a better explanation for why people dislike Go. All programming languages currently used for the web have gigantic downsides. They're slow. They have terrible package management. They have poor standard libraries. They have no static typing. They have no visual debuggers. They have no good IDE support. They don't integrate well with frontend code. Some programming languages are more flawed than other…

> A web service is not a device driver where every edge case has to be carefully considered.

Yikes, that's an assumption that is going to bite you hard in your career. I recommend escaping it as soon as possible. ;) The web is full of horror stories from people who assumed their part of a web-accessible product wasn't on a critical security / safety / reliability path.

I used to use Python and Ruby on Rails for web services; this is precisely why I left them. I got tired of dealing with typos becoming runtime exceptions.

> Bailing out with an exception is fine. Go disagrees.

Go makes it trivial to bail out with an exception: You panic. But panic is reserved for real exceptions, not common and expectable situations (like "file not found") and its defaults are therefore set to crash the whole process (which is fine if you're doing microservices and therefore can handle failures by crashing and restarting). I find other languages treat exceptions as not sufficiently exceptional.

Re: Why Go gets criticized so much

#148

Post by qihqi » Fri, Apr 08, 2016, 3:44 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…

Google has to statically link everything to produce a big binary with almost no dependency (besides syscalls), because it cannot promise the environment of the server, as you might get different boxes between deployments. So, it links all the jars and jvm into a huge binary, it's a pain to deal with that because it takes minutes to build and see your change.

And still, Java is almost used for front end only. When memory is not enough, you have to use C++.

Re: Why Go gets criticized so much

#149

Post by EugeneOZ » Fri, Apr 08, 2016, 3:44 PM UTC

luchadorvader wrote: post #101

jhall1468 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sometimes, sure. But none of those are our jobs (except if you are a football player, politician, etc). Computer programming languages are our jobs. It's okay to have preferences. I (a full time front-end webdev), think Python is probably the best language out there. But it doesn't define me, because that's just silly.

I agree that a language doesn't define you but what I wonder if a person's favorite language has some correlation to certain personality traits. I would be lieing if I didn't say I get more enjoyment from some languages where other people don't. Perl vs Python for example, pythons core values are to try and make it only one way to achieve something, whereas Perl tries to give you multiple ways to achieve something. I…

Ok, I write every day in Rust and JavaScript (and not just jumping monkey in JS, but a lot of code). They are almost orthogonal languages. Will it fit your theory? :)

Re: Why Go gets criticized so much

#150

Post by titzer » Fri, Apr 08, 2016, 3:45 PM UTC

zanny wrote: post #91

sievebrain wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"All" languages used for the web have those downsides? This is part of why Go culture scares me a bit. You seem to be overlooking the huge amounts of software written in .NET and on the JVM, none of which suffers from the problems you just outlined: there are great IDEs, decent type systems, good interactive debuggers, strong standard libraries, reasonable package management etc. This mental blind spot towards the to…

Java and C# have a first class ideology (object oriented) that does not align well with functional web servers which is how almost everyone writes theirs nowadays. These languages are getting better about it, but they are tacking on functional programming to a language that traditionally was strictly OO, and in the same way C++ has a lot of edge case behavior in being "OO tacked onto imperative" these languages suffe…

Both of those languages have migrated to more functional features with closures and lambdas. In fact, it seems like the entire landscape has tilted a bit toward the functional side in the last ~5 years.