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Half a decade with Go

blog.golang.org

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Re: Half a decade with Go

#41

Post by tel »

tptacek wrote: post #22
wyager wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you think is worthwhile about Go? I agree that the tooling is nice, but beyond that, there is nothing interesting to me. Goroutines aren't interesting; languages like Erlang and Haskell got green threads right many years before Go was on the scene.

That's a reductive summary of goroutines. I don't doubt other languages have competitive features, but let's be clear about what the feature is: * Lightweight threads with a scheduling and state overhead low enough to run hundreds of thousands of threads at a time. * Seamless integration with the language, without any rituals or incantations needed to invoke them; you can, for instance, trivially pass closures from g…

I'll try to represent Haskell here.

1. Totally, definitely. The new Haskell IO manager in GHC 7.8 completely blows this out of the water. It's wonderful.

2. You fork or async IO procedures which can be considered immutable values in their own right and passed around without the slightest concern. There is a small difficulty in that Haskell's laziness makes it a small trick to ensure that work gets done in the right place, which is undoubtedly a mark against Haskell, though perhaps not a huge one.

3. Things like STM, MVars, and (now) LVish let this happen in all kinds of ways. The only problem might be picking the right option due to the wealth of choices. Fortunately, the right answer is almost always STM.

I'd be more than happy to translate a task to demonstrate these things.

Re: Half a decade with Go

#42

Post by claystu »

wwweston wrote: post #39

OK, I'll admit it. I've spent six months with Go. I keep waiting for the moment when I understand it, maybe even develop some enthusiasm for it, and reach Pike-enlightenment. And I pretty much hate the language. I feel like I'm writing in something that combines the worst weaknesses of Pascal and Java. In fact, Mark Dominus' comments about Java ( http://blog.plover.com/prog/Java.html ) approximate my experience Go fa…

What weaknesses of Pascal are being repeated in Go?

Re: Half a decade with Go

#43

Post by TheHydroImpulse »

timtadh wrote: post #27
wcummings wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get the impression some of the folks in the Golang crowd are "Blub" programmers [1]. It's not so much a matter of simplicity and trade-offs as it is a matter of "I don't need things I don't know about", which isn't a good argument to use Golang. [1] http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html

I feel like you haven't met a lot of Go programmers in that case. The programmers I have met who use Go or are interested in it are often genuinely good programmers. Of course there are "crowd" followers in any language as popular in Go but Go is not a "Blub" language nor does it attract Blub programmers. Do I as a Go programmer sometimes wish that Go had feature X. Of course I do! I want that feature when I want tha…

> Macros are of course enormously useful but also very difficult to shoe horn into a c-family language properly since they need to be expanded at compile time (unless you just go ahead and embed you compiler backend into the runtime system of your language. That would be kinda of crazy/awesome but you could do it). Rust has of course proven the utility of such a choice.

Rust doesn't do that. Rust expands the macros at compile-time. Integrating the whole compiler into the runtime wouldn't make much sense considering what area Rust is targeting.

It's also recommended to not link a crate that is used during runtime with the compiler or parser because they're fairly big and would bloat your final build by a large amount.

Re: Half a decade with Go

#44

Post by wwweston »

kjksf wrote: post #16
wyager wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you think is worthwhile about Go? I agree that the tooling is nice, but beyond that, there is nothing interesting to me. Goroutines aren't interesting; languages like Erlang and Haskell got green threads right many years before Go was on the scene.

You should ponder why Erlang or Haskell achieved a fraction of Go's adoption despite being on the market 20+ years longer. Some people see languages as a bag of features (immutability! generic programming! laziness! operator overloading! algebraic types! hindley-miller type inference! pattern matching! exceptions! manual memory management!). See http://yager.io/programming/go.html for an example of that line of think…

> You should ponder why Erlang or Haskell achieved a fraction of Go's adoption despite being on the market 20+ years longer.

This line of thinking serves more to call in to question the engineering and management cultures we have than it does to reflect poorly on Haskell and Erlang, and if it's true that Go's essential strength compared to them is that it is well-fitted to these cultures, that's not particularly flattering, however locally practical it may be.

Re: Half a decade with Go

#45

Post by thirsteh »

ansible wrote: post #24
kjksf wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should ponder why Erlang or Haskell achieved a fraction of Go's adoption despite being on the market 20+ years longer. Some people see languages as a bag of features (immutability! generic programming! laziness! operator overloading! algebraic types! hindley-miller type inference! pattern matching! exceptions! manual memory management!). See http://yager.io/programming/go.html for an example of that line of think…

Designing a language is not about cramming every feature you can think of. It's about making good trade offs. Indeed. And the hallmark of the really good design is to examine the interactions of those features and see how well they mesh together. And what they imply about how actual programs are designed and maintained.

While I agree with these arguments, the purpose of Go is to Get Stuff Done (TM), and the main purpose of Haskell is to foster PL research and semi-formal methods. It's not really fair to say Haskell is unpopular because it crammed a bunch of things inthere: It is very popular in the niche it was designed for. Go just has a wider appeal.

And remember not to equate popularity with quality. We're all using JavaScript because that's what you need to do in the browser, not because it's a particularly good language. (Not that Go doesn't deserve the adoption it's gotten. It's great to see people ditching clunky Python/Ruby/C++/JavaScript stuff for Go.)

Re: Half a decade with Go

#47

Post by ansible »

wwweston wrote: post #39

OK, I'll admit it. I've spent six months with Go. I keep waiting for the moment when I understand it, maybe even develop some enthusiasm for it, and reach Pike-enlightenment. And I pretty much hate the language. I feel like I'm writing in something that combines the worst weaknesses of Pascal and Java. In fact, Mark Dominus' comments about Java ( http://blog.plover.com/prog/Java.html ) approximate my experience Go fa…

So I'll ask: What is it I need to read/work through in order to at least "get" Go and really understand its strengths (whether or not I end up liking it)?

As discussed elsewhere on this page, Go is not the most feature-rich language out there.

But it does have features that seem to help my solve my problems with a minimum amount of fuss. Like using interfaces liberally, instead of having to define classes. Having lexical closures is also nice.

If you're not working on an application that can benefit from concurrency, you may not see all the benefits of Go either.

What kind of problems were you trying to solve, and how did Go see heavyweight compared to how you'd solve the problem in some other language?

Re: Half a decade with Go

#48

Post by f2f »

wyager wrote: post #33
zzzcpan wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And I hope it stays that way. We don't need more features, we need to address psychological issue of mistake-making.

> We don't need more features You may be a victim of the Blub paradox. There are many useful and powerful features missing from languages like Go, and many of them (like powerful type systems) exactly address human mistake-making.

well, rust has all those powerful features. it's been out in the open for exactly as long as Go has.

Re: Half a decade with Go

#49

Post by cft »

wwweston wrote: post #39

OK, I'll admit it. I've spent six months with Go. I keep waiting for the moment when I understand it, maybe even develop some enthusiasm for it, and reach Pike-enlightenment. And I pretty much hate the language. I feel like I'm writing in something that combines the worst weaknesses of Pascal and Java. In fact, Mark Dominus' comments about Java ( http://blog.plover.com/prog/Java.html ) approximate my experience Go fa…

Go is the only language that allows one to write very scalable TCP servers fast (i mean development effot). The servers are almost as fast as C (i.e. 15x Python), but the development time is like Python.

Re: Half a decade with Go

#50

Post by cgag »

wwweston wrote: post #39

OK, I'll admit it. I've spent six months with Go. I keep waiting for the moment when I understand it, maybe even develop some enthusiasm for it, and reach Pike-enlightenment. And I pretty much hate the language. I feel like I'm writing in something that combines the worst weaknesses of Pascal and Java. In fact, Mark Dominus' comments about Java ( http://blog.plover.com/prog/Java.html ) approximate my experience Go fa…

I don't think you're going to come around on it. It's not suddenly going to stop being terrible at abstraction. That essay seems very accurate and applies to Golang.

The strengths of Go to me seem to be its extensive standard libary and the fact that you don't need to worry about writing elegant code because it's not really an option. That reduced decision making is actually really appealing to me on some level, but it's not enough for me to consider it over what I consider better tools (Haskell, Rust).

I'm currently porting a tiny program a friend wrote in Go to Haskell so we can compare notes, and I think the Haskell is both safer and more elegant, but I'm jealous of the fact that all the libraries he used are from the standard library while I have to evaluate libs of varying quality. However, I would rather put my time in to improving the Haskell ecosystem than using something convenient that makes a lot of decisions I disagree with.

edit: I also think there's value in being a conventional imperative language as someone mentioned below. I with there were something between Go and Haskell. Perhaps that'd essentially be Rust with immutable data structures and garbage collection.

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