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I Want Off Mr. Golang's Wild Ride

fasterthanli.me

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

#161

Post by hinkley »

palerdot wrote: post #78
jsjddbbwj wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Weakly typed is sloppy.

Python is 'strongly' typed `dynamic` language!!!

There are two technical conversations I don't have because everybody just gets mad and nothing gets resolved. (Note to reader: if you haven't guessed already, this means I am not going to be reading replies to this thread and certainly not responding to them. Go outside and get some air.)

One, the Monty Hall problem. You either get it or you will die on a hill of misunderstanding. I've never seen anyone's mind be changed (I had to change my own mind). Statistics are really fucking hard.

Two, that the differences between the Java Language Spec and the Java Virtual Machine spec mean that Java is not quite as statically, strongly typed as you think. There is code that you cannot (re-)compile that runs just fine, for some useful definitions of 'fine'.

To support lazy loading of classes, and reduce inter-version dependency hell, the first invocation of every function is dynamically dispatched, and the result is memoized. It's not Duck Typing, but it isn't link-time resolution either. It's sort of a Schroedinger's Cat situation. Until you open the box it could be anything. The first Generics implementations and later generations of code obfuscators (ab)used the hell out of this. In fact I don't think Pizza (Java 1.1 era generics prototype) worked without it, and some languages-on-the-JVM may have been intractably slow.

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

#162

Post by throwaway894345 »

fhood wrote: post #35
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…

I surprises me that most people here aren't up in arms in agreement with this point. Code that is silently incorrect is an absolute disaster on an enterprise level. I spend a lot of time writing seemingly redundant double and triple error checking into my code, only to have the designers of the LANGUAGE say, "yeah, most filepaths are utf-8 so seems good enough to me".

> Code that is silently incorrect is an absolute disaster on an enterprise level.

Enterprise software is not well-known for its quality or correctness.

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

#163

Post by defnotashton2 »

mushufasa wrote: post #7

main gripe seems to be that go will "optimize for the 90% case, ignoring correctness" -- particularly leading to issues on non-unix systems like windows. That fits Go's stated goals afaik. While I understand the author ran into problems for their use-case, I did not find this rant compelling as a general criticism.

Same because if you try to create the % case you end up with things like ASP. NET and entity framework. Working with those for 5 years I was constantly annoyed with how far I could add super complex features only to have to unravel them to implement a simple lower level edge case.

And in my experience this too easily reflects poorly on the devs "well I found a blog post for ef that does what we need in 30 seconds.." which just isn't the case. I migrated to golang and find its nuances much easier to swallow. No generics? True - write a generator for your use case. It's really not that hard..

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

#164

Post by klodolph »

fhood wrote: post #22

The author spent a lot of time dwelling on Window's filesystems, at which point many of the readers got bored and started commenting. There are actually a couple of excellent points in here, the majority of which relate to Go's tendency to just be silently completely wrong in its behaviors from time to time, and is absolutely packed with hidden gotchas.

That said… I feel that Rust’s use of WTF-8 for OsString on Windows has resulted in some really nasty problems, especially since OsString doesn’t expose any useful methods for string manipulation. As far as I can tell, Rust’s approach fails to hide any of the complexity, and then adds the additional complexity of a new encoding and conversions on top. I can see that there’s some end goal of being able to work with OsString in Rust code but at the moment the API is missing everything except a couple functions to convert it into something else.

It’s a truly cursed problem that we have three separate notions of strings. We have Unicode strings, we have bytestrings, and we have wchar_t strings on Windows. No two of these are completely interoperable. This has a ton of direct consequences which cannot be completely avoided. For example, if I want to make a version of “ls” that gives a result in JSON, I’m already fucked and I have to change my requirements.

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

#165

Post by filleduchaos »

jsjddbbwj wrote: post #112
blattimwind wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Strongly typed: >>> "foo" + 3.141 TypeError: can only concatenate str (not "float") to str >>> object() + 3.141 TypeError: unsupported operand type(s) for +: 'object' and 'float' Weakly typed: > "foo" + 3.141 "foo3.141" > Object() + 3.141 "[object Object]3.141" > [] + {} "[object Object]" > {} + [] 0

a = 3 a = 'abc' There goes your strength, Samson. Just because there's something worse, that doesn't make python strongly typed

Yes, obviously, Python isn't statically typed. I fail to see how this demonstrates a lack of strong typing though.

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

#166

Post by fasterthanlime »

flohofwoe wrote: post #140

Isn't basically all of this shortcomings of Go's standard library, not "Go the language"? The Go standard seems to be heavily geared towards doing work on the server-side, and "server-side" essentially means "Linux" today. If I'd need to write "client-side" cross-platform code that also needs to run on Windows, Go wouldn't be my first choice, also not my second or third. And TBH, most other languages are not that muc…

A standard library says a lot about the language. Even if someone made a much better path/file handling library for Go, another one of its strengths are the ubiquitous interfaces you can rely on across libraries. Unless the superior library gained a lot of adoption really quickly, it would remain largely irrelevant in the face of the standard that was set years ago by the Go authors.

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

#167

Post by kodablah »

jjoonathan wrote: post #59
kodablah wrote: post #3

2/3rds about platform FS incompat, last third about only a couple of things like time comparisons being monotonic now (does more good than bad IMO). I suspect if issues of such importance are enough to make you want off the "wild ride", you will not find a ride suitable.

He presented them as typical examples, not as issues of such importance as to independently make him off the "wild ride." He also compared them to alternatives that he found favorable, which specifically addresses the idea that alternatives are worse. It could be reasonable to disagree with the content of his argument, but it didn't have either of these structural problems.

> it didn't have either of these structural problems.

Disagree...the volume/importance of grievances should be directly proportional to willingness to abandon. That a few examples can be provided isn't an indictment of the ecosystem anymore than it would be if I did the same to those the OP found favorable.

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

#169

Post by filleduchaos »

cdelsolar wrote: post #148
fasterthanlime wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not that this is a good faith summary, but I've updated the article to point out that it's not just "this random 7-star library", but in fact, 266 publicly-available Go packages.

Your rant largely has to do with a library someone wrote that did not handle dependencies well. A few years ago you would have complained about lack of module support at all. I have a toy project that's relatively simple, and the Javascript frontend has a lockfile that is literally over 10000 lines long.

> Your rant largely has to do with a library someone wrote that did not handle dependencies well

I am rather curious about how you concluded that "lots of dependencies bad" was the point of that section of the article and not, perhaps, the absurdity of having to compile an empty file to get around the solution to a bug being hidden from end developers.

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

#170

Post by fasterthanlime »

cdelsolar wrote: post #148
fasterthanlime wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not that this is a good faith summary, but I've updated the article to point out that it's not just "this random 7-star library", but in fact, 266 publicly-available Go packages.

Your rant largely has to do with a library someone wrote that did not handle dependencies well. A few years ago you would have complained about lack of module support at all. I have a toy project that's relatively simple, and the Javascript frontend has a lockfile that is literally over 10000 lines long.

I was already shipping Go code a few years ago, and the various vendoring tools gave me a lot less grief the new module system has. Besides, it still had all the same limitations, the same standard library choices, the same sloppy abstractions. The rant applied then and it applies now - and focuses not on any specific problem outlined in the article, but the general philosophy of the language, its standard library, and its ecosystem.
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