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Half a decade with Go

blog.golang.org

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Re: Half a decade with Go

#51

Post by eudox »

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.

No, that's not necessary at all, with Rust-like macros which are simple pattern->template things. Macros have zero runtime cost.

Re: Half a decade with Go

#52

Post by tlmr »

cft wrote: post #49
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.

What about Julia?

Re: Half a decade with Go

#53

Post by nickik »

cgag wrote: post #50
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…

I dont know much about go, but I always thought that the problem with 'the standard library does everything' is that it starts to feel heavy and better alternatives pop up. Then you have these dark places in the library that most people avoid, and you cant really throw away.

Clojure used to have something called, clojure contrib and it was kind of awsome, it did pretty much everything in just one jar. It was also a huge problem to mentain and everybody wanted to be in contrib, so you had the one json lib in contrib and fasters outside.

With clojure 1.3 it got split up into many diffrent parts and it still servs as somewhat of a community standard or recommended library. Overall its much better and much more usful, but sometimes I miss the days when everything was in one jar on on dependency.

Re: Half a decade with Go

#54

Post by hyp0 »

jerf wrote: post #36
tptacek wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Neat. You can start an Erlang process (or whatever they're called) with an anonymous function, and pass it another anonymous function that closes over another lexical environment?

Yes, both in Haskell and Erlang. For me, Go's big win is that I can finally bring this, the right way to do it, to work, because it's the first time this paradigm is present in a conventional imperative language , not that it is the first in general. Many other languages got it right in theory before Go, but there was always some practical stopper, involving some obscure programming paradigm that I stood no chance of…

Like Java's strategy (http://www.win.tue.nl/~evink/education/avp/pdf/feel-of-java....)

  Java is a blue collar language. It's not PhD thesis
  material but a language for a job.  Java feels very
  familiar to many different programmers because we
  preferred tried-and-tested things.

Re: Half a decade with Go

#55

Post by djur »

f2f wrote: post #48
wyager wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Rust isn't nearly as stable as Go. It still hasn't reached the state that Go was in when it was released outside Google. That's not a judgment of Rust, just a result of it being developed in the open instead of inside a company, and it being much more ambitious than Go.

Re: Half a decade with Go

#56

Post by Dewie »

f2f wrote: post #48
wyager wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Rust 0.1 came out in the beginning of 2012, about 3 months before Go 1.0 game out (or go1). In the meantime, Rust has changed a lot and is only now close to a 1.0 release.

Re: Half a decade with Go

#57

Post by wwweston »

ansible wrote: post #47
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 lex…

I like functions as first-class values and closures. If they weren't present, I might well have bailed months ago. :) And from various experiences doing OO with other languages, I can kindof buy that Go interfaces are often 80% of what you want.

Most of what I've been working on is a Rest API. Here's an example of a problem that felt like it should be something for which I'd be able to write an abstraction to deal with, but turned out to be challenging, at least as a n00b:

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/golang-nuts/JhsiiGHQ...

(Incidentally, though I moved past my then really poor understanding of Go interfaces, I wasn't able to apply the respondent's answer or my new general knowledge to achieve the abstraction I was looking for, and settled for just grinding out the same code for the dozen entities/endpoints it applied to.)

Concurrency: I suspect there's a bit that's hidden in some libraries we're using, and we may yet need to write our own code for some API requests that get processed offline, but I haven't had to explicitly write code for it yet.

If you can think of a specific exercise that might serve to illustrate Go's outstanding concurrency strengths, I'd be interested to try it and compare efforts to another language or two.

Re: Half a decade with Go

#58

Post by zzzcpan »

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.

No need to get personal. I was talking about all the features in all the languages, not the ones in Go. And yes, we don't need more new features, we have plenty.

However, none of the languages I know of address psychological issues. Does type system reduce mistakes or introduce? Certainly both, don't know which one more though. But the question itself is wrong. It's not the type system who makes mistakes, humans do. And humans have brains. And brains are limited in their ability to do some thing while keeping other things in mind. And if among other things types happen to be present and mistake was made, than one could say types added to that mistake. And if types were not something programmer needed to think than type system certainly didn't add to that mistake. Things are not as simple as most programmers tend to think. Features don't matter how they think they matter. And research in language design was broken since the beginning of times and, sadly, still is.

(if you read "no silver bullet", "out of the tar pit" papers and couple of recent ones on bugs you should get the idea of how bad things are with mistake-making research)

Re: Half a decade with Go

#59

Post by asdf1234 »

tel wrote: post #41
tptacek wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 p…

> The new Haskell IO manager in GHC 7.8 completely blows this out of the water.

Go will still outperform Haskell by a huge margin and the typical Go process will have a much smaller memory footprint.

I don't even like Go, but nobody choosing Go is realistically considering Haskell as an alternative.

Re: Half a decade with Go

#60

Post by djur »

wcummings wrote: post #18
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…

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

"Blub" as a concept isn't really useful anymore. I've seen people attacked as "blub programmers" for criticizing Go for its lack of features. At worst it's a personal attack ("you are a short-sighted programmer"), at best it's kind of supercilious ("language X is great, it's just over your head").
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