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Ask HN: Go programming language is over ten years old. What do you think of it?

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Re: Ask HN: Go programming language is over ten years old. What do you think of it?

#171

Post by piinbinary »

dhekir wrote: post #111
piinbinary wrote: post #23

I find myself reaching for it over other languages when I want to build small servers with a bit of in-memory state or a bit of heavy processing. For little search-engines, Go is perfect. While writing servers in Flask + Python is much more convenient, I still prefer Go because I don't run into the limits that Python has. The development process is fluid enough that I wish the language was suited to more usecases. Wh…

OCaml is good for handling abstract syntax trees (strong typing, pattern matching) and its mix of imperative and functional programming don't require using borrow-checker nor monads. You can also consider Reason, if you prefer a more C-like syntax.

I really ought to learn OCaml (besides just the toy programs I've written). I think if I got past the messy ecosystem (is tuareg the right thing to use, or is that the old thing?) I'd really like it.

Re: Ask HN: Go programming language is over ten years old. What do you think of it?

#172

Post by mrmonkeyman »

stperrin wrote: post #55

Go is a welcomed simplicity to the stack in a world where everyone is over complicating software engineering by jumping to Kubernetes and micro-services. Simplicity really is where Go stands out against languages like Java. Yes, you may write more boilerplate and break DRY, but your code will be readable and won’t contain any hidden magic. We spend most of our work day reading and trying to understanding code. What y…

Ironically Kubernetes is written in Go.

Re: Ask HN: Go programming language is over ten years old. What do you think of it?

#173

Post by mrmonkeyman »

dfgdghdf wrote: post #169
jahaja wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What does Go bring to the table? A still maintainable code base 5 years along.

Is it really though? Go is not expressive enough to model your problem domain in a concise and coherent way, which leads to very large code-bases compared to other languages. Whilst each line is easy to understand in the small (because there is very little abstraction), it becomes extremely difficult to understand how the code works in the large.

Your "problem domain" is a bunch of boring, easy, simplistic tax and/or logistics calculations and you know it.

Re: Ask HN: Go programming language is over ten years old. What do you think of it?

#174

Post by oriesdan »

ainar-g wrote: post #160
oriesdan wrote: post #32

After 9 years of ruby, I finally switched to Go as my professional language 3 years ago, after a couple years of side projects with it. My feelings after building for that long : safety and productivity. I initially thought it was because of moving to compiler and type checking, but then I learned C for my personal use (an other thing passing through Go allowed for me), and was surprised to realize my C compiler was…

Re. Go 2. The Go Team people have repeatedly said that they want to avoid the Python 3 situation, so even if there will be a real, compatibility breaking Go 2, it won't be anywhere near that level of incompatibility. They'll probably just fix a few nits like string(int). Re. C. You really should use at least one static analyser when programming in C. Clang-tidy has been my go-to tool for that, and it's been working p…

Thanks, I'll have a look at it.

Re: Ask HN: Go programming language is over ten years old. What do you think of it?

#175

Post by cy_hauser »

lanstin wrote: post #120
edumucelli wrote: post #43

I do not like it. The lack a proper (1) Class, (2) Enums (seriously, using constants to describe a proper Enum like Java has is a must, we are in 2020 not in 1980), (3) being able to call methods on methods on nil pointers, (4) generics that are available for langauge internals but not for language users, the list could go on. All this just because I am working on it few months now. Let's see how it will evolve throu…

I think most Go people will put most anything that goes over the wire into some protocol description language like protobuf or even swagger. Inside your call stack I am not sure you need enums instead of constants. If you are either persisting or transmitting data then you want some formal description which will essentially get you enums as useful symbolic values.

Lack of real enums is one of my biggest annoyances with Go. So so many times I've put the wrong enum value in because it's just an int and it matches another set of enums. I've taken to putting each set of enums into a separate file and separate folder just to help the compiler catch this. The project I'm working on now has about 25 separate enum files+folders. Gagh!

Re: Ask HN: Go programming language is over ten years old. What do you think of it?

#176

Post by oriesdan »

dkarlovi wrote: post #164
oriesdan wrote: post #32

After 9 years of ruby, I finally switched to Go as my professional language 3 years ago, after a couple years of side projects with it. My feelings after building for that long : safety and productivity. I initially thought it was because of moving to compiler and type checking, but then I learned C for my personal use (an other thing passing through Go allowed for me), and was surprised to realize my C compiler was…

Can't say for the rest, but Symfony 2 was a resounding success. Current Symfony 5 is very similar to Symfony 2, with just a ton of refinements and facelifts.

Oh yes, I'm not saying those are bad projects. What they have in common is that migrating from previous version to them was especially difficult and painful.

The few symfony developers I know indeed loved symfony-2 very much. But migrating their projects from symfony-1 to symfony-2 was felt basically as a rewrite.

Re: Ask HN: Go programming language is over ten years old. What do you think of it?

#177

Post by blandflakes »

piinbinary wrote: post #171
dhekir wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OCaml is good for handling abstract syntax trees (strong typing, pattern matching) and its mix of imperative and functional programming don't require using borrow-checker nor monads. You can also consider Reason, if you prefer a more C-like syntax.

I really ought to learn OCaml (besides just the toy programs I've written). I think if I got past the messy ecosystem (is tuareg the right thing to use, or is that the old thing?) I'd really like it.

I always wonder if I just showed up late when I hear about the ecosystem! I just get opam for packages, dune for building, and merlin for editor integration (I did pay the complexity task using a language server for neovim, but merlin integrates with vim pretty trivially). It was easier than setting up Java + mvn|sbt|whatever + Intellij, easier than Python... there's maybe more going on than Go because the tools aren't all in one distribution, but man are the returns over Go massive (for the things I value).

Re: Ask HN: Go programming language is over ten years old. What do you think of it?

#178

Post by cy_hauser »

_huayra_ wrote: post #45

I'm glad it enables other folks to build such great tools with it, but I don't think I'd pick it for my own projects or prefer to code in it at work. For the clever stuff they picked up from ConcurrentML (channels), they treat the user (developer) like an idiot due to having to spell out everything in great deal compared to languages that have a better type system. It's good to get a lot of programmers onboard at Goo…

> I think people complain about Go because it's not the hammer for their nail.

Or it's _almost_ the correct hammer! If they'd just fix those damn

Re: Ask HN: Go programming language is over ten years old. What do you think of it?

#179

Post by aprdm »

I played with Golang a little bit, it is very boring (and that is good), it is very pragmatic and performant.

I didn't like dealing with JSON data but other than that.. it's great to get work done in a simple way if work == services/backendy kind of things.

I would love to rewrite a lot of our python services in golang, both for the performance gains and to make the projects look more alike.

Python gives way too much flexibility, is a pain to deploy and has too many frameworks for doing the same thing.

Re: Ask HN: Go programming language is over ten years old. What do you think of it?

#180

Post by TopInvestor »

I started using Golang 8 years ago and introduced it to the company I worked for to build several web services from scratch.

The reason it was adopted quickly was that building RESTful Web Services or gRPC Micro Services is relatively easy because all the libraries needed are native to the language. Of course I was building .net SOAP web services for years and knew the customers' needs. Another reason was the developers knew first hand how inflexible was configuring IIS with its web.config and the efforts needed to make it work.

Then the adoption of Kubernetes was easy too because it was written on Golang. The next transition to GCP was natural too. Basically being backed from Google made all this technology development and adoption a natural and I'm glad that I made this choice early.

Another reason I'm using Golang is that my recent project is mobile-GCP solution making possible to get information about 80mil/100GB US Property database in iOS App:

https://topinvestor.app

One of the reason this functionality was made possible because I managed to create Gomobile embedded database in iOS which is much faster than SQLite or CoreData for my purpose - creating geodetic solution - tapping on the map is retuning lat/lng which are two numbers and creating just one number representation of location suitable for key-value datastore.

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