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I Want Off Mr. Golang's Wild Ride

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

#201

Post by estebank »

SlowRobotAhead wrote: post #88
irishsultan wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Your gripes with x should be independent of “y lang does it better” aside from just knowing it is possible to be better. And what better way to demonstrate it's possible to do better by having an example ready?

Because you may turn anyone who would otherwise be empathetic of your gripe with their reluctance to accept your proposed solution. I’m reminded that “not every problem needs a solution”. Or at least needs one right now. I agree, in this case it made good points, but too many of them. It just didn’t need so many examples of why “Rust is better”. If you were invested in Rust or Go, this article reads differently to yo…

Them you would have to contend with people that are either not convinced it is a problem or that think a better solution can't exist.

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

#202

Post by Fellshard »

klodolph wrote: post #164
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 OsS…

Isn't the point of OsString that it's essentially a faux-union type that is intended to be immediately converted to some concrete representation which /is/ richly manipulable?

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

#203

Post by masklinn »

whateveracct wrote: post #160
sagichmal wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Type aliases (type X = Y) are a niche feature and not meant for this use case. If you had done e.g. type X Y you would have had more success.

Sorry I miswrote. I meant `type X Y` by "type alias" (terminology from other languages) `type X Y` is still affected - you will 100% _not_ have more success :) Proof (using JSON this time): https://play.golang.org/p/erfcSIe-Z7b

> `type X Y` is still affected - you will 100% _not_ have more success :)

type X Y neither inherits methods nor forwards anything (what struct embedding does), so you need to know about the protocol (which you're not told because it decides to just encode the bytes), and then you need to implement its methods on the newtype explicitly forwarding them to the underlying one.

TBF this is a pretty awful case as Go just goes and generates garbage without prompting.

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

#204

Post by krallja »

bsimpson wrote: post #181

> Nine out of ten software engineers agree: it's a miracle anything works at all There was a beautiful rant about a decade ago called something like "everything's broken all the time and nobody cares." The gist of it is that all software is written by people. Anyone who's written software knows that it's usually riddled with hidden corner cases, unfortunate tradeoffs, rushed deadlines, etc. Software is also moving in…

https://medium.com/message/everything-is-broken-81e5f33a24e1 ?

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

#205

Post by GordonS »

umvi wrote: post #2

Maybe I'm a zealot, but I don't really consider "doesn't work as well on windows" a con of a language. C# is (or at least used to be) utter garbage on Linux compared to Windows. I don't hold that against C#, but rather recognize that Linux/Windows are very different, and that compiler maintenance and development is non-trivial (and obviously Microsoft is going to prioritize Windows). This article is basically a rant…

Not sure what you mean about C# on Linux. More than a decade ago it worked just fine on Linux using Mono. For a few years now it's worked just as well on Linux as it has on Windows, using dotnet Core.

Source: I've been developing using C# on both Windows and Linux for a very long time.

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

#206

Post by adamrezich »

zxcvbn4038 wrote: post #194

What is the point of a ten page rant like this? If the guy doesn’t like coding in Go, just stop using Go, problem solved. How many more times are we have to have the language X is different then language Y and I hate feature Z discussion? These are popping up almost daily. We could probably automate generating a daily rant with commentary, and let all the Joe Nobody coders get back to whatever they are trying to acco…

it is often easier to learn from someone else's mistake than to have to make the mistake yourself. what's not to be gained by learning from someone else's experience? why do you see criticism (with actually-encountered, real-world examples, no less!) as being without merit?

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

#207

Post by Thaxll »

pmarreck wrote: post #152
thedance wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There aren't any abstractions in any language or library that don't leak everything about what they are trying to hide as well as everything about their own implementation. That's just life. It's impossible to hide complexity. Whatever wraps one thing will be strictly more complex than the wrapped thing was.

This is funny because after almost 4 years of working with Elixir and watching Go from arms’ length, I literally see NONE of the criticisms regularly leveled at Go. This is not an exaggeration. In fact, Elixir has few criticisms at all to begin with, and it’s driven very large sites already at this point. (Yeah, it can’t compile easily distributable self contained binaries. It’s not (yet) designed for that.) Not inte…

The reason is because Go is very popular where Elixir is not, if Elixir was standing where Go is now it would be pretty much the same, I guaranty you that.

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

#208

Post by krallja »

zxcvbn4038 wrote: post #194

What is the point of a ten page rant like this? If the guy doesn’t like coding in Go, just stop using Go, problem solved. How many more times are we have to have the language X is different then language Y and I hate feature Z discussion? These are popping up almost daily. We could probably automate generating a daily rant with commentary, and let all the Joe Nobody coders get back to whatever they are trying to acco…

Hardly anybody writes a retraction after three years of “mongodb is great in production” — they silently switch to a new product, and maybe say something positive about it too. These kind of rants are hard-earned battle scars of former zealots learning their lesson, and should not be discarded.

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

#209

Post by marcus_holmes »

asdkhadsj wrote: post #99
marcus_holmes wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd buy that if there hadn't been approximately 48764576459674 "Rust vs Go" (well, more usually "this is why Rust is way better than Go and you're some kind of moron if you're not switching to Rust today") articles in the last few months.

Okay, let me ask this then - what language would be better compared to contrast the shortcomings of Go that the other takes issue with? Certainly not C++, no?

In 5 years' time, when there are a gazillion "Rust vs ${Nim}" articles out there, extolling the virtues of another language and pointing out the shortcomings of Rust, then let's ask this question again.

I'm not questioning the critique - no language is perfect, and Go certainly has its share of problems. I'm questioning the sudden rash of "Rust is awesome, Go is shit" articles over the last few months. It's not a good thing.

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

#210

Post by totalperspectiv »

dilap wrote: post #23

If you imagine a spectrum of languages from sloppy-but-"easy" to precise-but-"hard", with something like Python or Ruby way off on the left and something like Rust way off on the right, Go is sitting somewhere in the middle. And so if what you're craving is absolute precision and maximal avoidance of errors or incorrect behavior, then Go is not going to be your jam. I sympathize w/ that. That said, these specific com…

> And so if what you're craving is absolute precision and maximal avoidance of errors or incorrect behavior

If you are being paid to develop software, doing anything other than aiming for absolute correctness seems negligent, at best.

I think this is part of what leads to obsession with Rust. We build so many things on a daily basis with a long long list of 'it depends'. But Rust aims to make you write something as correctly as possible, and provides a really solid base for you to do this. So that list of 'it depends' shrinks drastically and you feel superhuman for building something so solid.

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