Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Re: Moving from PHP to Go and Back Again

blog.breakthru.solutions

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 281 posts

Re: Re: Moving from PHP to Go and Back Again

#31

Post by BuckRogers »

sagichmal wrote: post #12
cft wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Languages like C and Rust are true system programming languages, and they are not one step removed from assembler. Rust has a very complex compiler. Go is a low level applications programming language.

This pedantic terminology fight about what constitutes a “systems” language hasn’t been worth having since 2009, when all of these arguments were already aired and resolved. Please find another hill to die on.

He is correct though, at least from the perspective of Go's own designers? Wasn't "systems language" removed from the description at some point. I've listened to interviews with Rob Pike who even outright said they got the messaging wrong there.

I think it's pretty well accepted that no systems language has GC. Go is on the same abstraction layer as Java/C#. Everything in text can be taken as a slight, and to ensure that doesn't read that way, I am a believer in targeting that level of abstraction most of the time. I think it's the sweet spot. I'm not a fan of the dual language approach targeting high (Python) and low (C). Java or C# makes more sense to me, for most software. That's my opinion. If I needed more than what those heavy hitters provide, I'd just go all the way and reach for Rust myself.

So I don't necessary see the parent comment from ctf as combative. I think he's just seeking accuracy.

Re: Re: Moving from PHP to Go and Back Again

#32

Post by nurettin »

Lazare wrote: post #27
patricklouys wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Modern PHP is very nice to work with. Ignore the haters that haven't touched the language in 10 years.

To be fair to the haters, even modern PHP can be horrible. The old nightmares are still around; we've just agreed to ignore them, and maybe deprecate a couple of the worst. (And ternary syntax is still broken, and the standard library is anything but standard.) But yes, if you're working on a modern PHP project, there's a lot to love: A solid module system, an enormous sea of high quality libraries, type checking, a…

Is it better than nodets?

Re: Re: Moving from PHP to Go and Back Again

#33

Post by paxys »

cft wrote: post #4

I don't know why the author bothered to even respond to that Medium article. The Medium article starts with that Go shines as a systems programming language. He lost me right there: how can a language with a garbage collector and a runtime be called a "systems programming language"?

Go's "runtime" is just a library. Programs are still compiled to native machine code.

Re: Re: Moving from PHP to Go and Back Again

#35

Post by powerslacker »

warent wrote: post #22

Go is not OOP in any shape or form, no matter what “they” try to tell you. Go is imperative language with procedural style of writing code. Yes, you have objects and you can attach methods to them, similarly to Ruby where everything is an object, but that’s basically it. Never, ever, try to repeat yourself in Go. You will crash and burn. When it comes to Go, spaghetti code is what you want to write. This was really f…

you got me to make an account and move the gif, I hope you're happy with yourself

Re: Re: Moving from PHP to Go and Back Again

#36

Post by sidlls »

BuckRogers wrote: post #31
sagichmal wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This pedantic terminology fight about what constitutes a “systems” language hasn’t been worth having since 2009, when all of these arguments were already aired and resolved. Please find another hill to die on.

He is correct though, at least from the perspective of Go's own designers? Wasn't "systems language" removed from the description at some point. I've listened to interviews with Rob Pike who even outright said they got the messaging wrong there. I think it's pretty well accepted that no systems language has GC. Go is on the same abstraction layer as Java/C#. Everything in text can be taken as a slight, and to ensure…

Java has been used as the implementation language for games, high performance servers, message queuing systems, operating systems, and operating embedded devices for goodness sake. It doesn't get much more "systems-y" than that. Go is surely at least as suitable for these uses.

I think the other commenter is correct: it seems like a semantics argument, and a rather pointless one at that.

Re: Re: Moving from PHP to Go and Back Again

#37

Post by powerslacker »

klodolph wrote: post #3

Everyone I know who uses Go complains about it. Every day you write Go code you will come across some piece of code that would be shorter with templates in C++ or using , or you could do it more simply in Python, or if you were really clever it would be a single line of Haskell. And yet we keep writing Go. By comparison, I'm a bit put off by the Rust community's evangelism, but that might just be my personal experien…

I write Go on the daily and I really enjoy it. But hey, whatever floats your boat!

Re: Re: Moving from PHP to Go and Back Again

#38

Post by pmontra »

I don't know Go and I didn't use PHP very much so I'm qualified to comment only on this part:

> I’ve worked with RoR, and a variety of frameworks in the Node world – and I have never had a framework project where I didn’t end up fighting the very system that was supposed to make development “easy”.

This is not my experience with Rails, Django and Phoenix. Actually, I was probably fighting Rails in my very first project in 2006 (or was it 2005?) but I was writing it as if it were Struts (I was coming from Java.) Then I started coding as if it was Rails and got a great speedup in terms of coding time. I'm less proficient in Django. It seems that it doesn't really enforce a project structure and one can do almost what s/he wants. I've seen projects that look very different to a degree I never saw with Rails. Basically all Rails projects look the same. Phoenix is somewhat in the middle.

So, if the author is wrestling with frameworks either he's not proficient with them, but this doesn't seem to be the case, or he genuinely doesn't like to be constrained by the requirements of those frameworks. This is not a bad thing per se. If one feels like that, he's going to be a happier developer writing code with the architecture he designs. I'm not sure customers will be happy too, but I don't know what kind of projects and customers he has.

About me, I prefer to stick with standardized architectures that any developer after me will be able to understand in minutes. I'm a freelancer and I just don't have the time to spend a significant amount of my customers budget to learn (and make learn) more clever and optimized architectures before doing any real work. If I had my company running around one software product, then maybe I would design it from scratch. Reality check: I wrote so many MVPs in Rails, especially for customers. Given the usual outcome (failure to get traction) it would have been a waste of money to start with a more clever design.

Re: Re: Moving from PHP to Go and Back Again

#39

Post by powerslacker »

patricklouys wrote: post #17
psergeant wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’d really like a strongly typed (or optionally typed) Python or Perl derivative. Rust feels most Perl-like so far.

Modern PHP is very nice to work with. Ignore the haters that haven't touched the language in 10 years.

I wrote some PHP last month and I still hate it :)

Though it has improved dramatically.

Re: Re: Moving from PHP to Go and Back Again

#40

Post by lpghatguy »

Lazare wrote: post #27
patricklouys wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Modern PHP is very nice to work with. Ignore the haters that haven't touched the language in 10 years.

To be fair to the haters, even modern PHP can be horrible. The old nightmares are still around; we've just agreed to ignore them, and maybe deprecate a couple of the worst. (And ternary syntax is still broken, and the standard library is anything but standard.) But yes, if you're working on a modern PHP project, there's a lot to love: A solid module system, an enormous sea of high quality libraries, type checking, a…

Solid module system?

It's still the same as C, which is _not_ a solid module system.

Post reply on HN