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Go is my hammer, and everything is a nail

maragu.dev

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Re: Go is my hammer, and everything is a nail

#531

Post by Someone »

theshrike79 wrote: post #511
afiodorov wrote: post #462

I used to work for a Go shop. We dealt with financial data. I found it so annoying that many of my colleagues would use Go for one-off tasks such as aggregating CSV files, updating the database with some data, or fetching data from the database, and then trying to make a plot. I saw my colleagues again and again implementing basic algorithms such as rolling median, or finding a maximum. Instead of loading data into P…

> I used to work for a Go shop. We dealt with financial data. People dealing with finance are THE MOST risk-averse people I know. No new tool will be used without years of vetting and it'll still be blamed if something goes wrong - even if the new tool never touched that bit of the process =) Source: Consulted for a finance company and it was Ye Olde Java and COBOL all the way down =)

If they’re risk averse, they shouldn’t, as the OP claimed, implement basic algorithms such as rolling median, or finding a maximum instead of loading data into Pandas and doing a group by, would they?

Re: Go is my hammer, and everything is a nail

#532

Post by jaapz »

BiteCode_dev wrote: post #277
bborud wrote: post #94

People always under-estimate the cost of properly learning a language. At any given time I tend to have a "main go-to language". I typically spend 2-4 years getting to the point where I can say I "know" a language. Then I try to stick to it long enough for the investment to pay off. Usually 8-10 years. A surprising number of people think this is a very long time. It isn't. This is typically the time it takes to under…

And then you have the ever changing ecosystem, that can take years so sort out on it's own and must be constantly studied. E.G: if you arrive in Python right now, numpy is in version 2 and polars is stable. uv is all the rage, pydantic gained so much perf it's not even funny, toml is part of the stdlib and textual is looking very good. Type hints are much better than 2 years ago, htmx is used a lot in the web departm…

Instead of constantly trying to keep up with everything in an ecosystem (which is simply impossible), just keep up with the stuff you are using to get your product working. Keep a side eye on the rest of the ecosystem to see if something neat is developing that you might use, but no need to study every hyped package coming out. In the end they are all tools to get something that works.

We still use flask and it's been great all the way, and it still holds up really well, there's no reason to move to any of the other packages just because that's the next new shiny thing.

Re: Go is my hammer, and everything is a nail

#533

Post by alemanek »

DarkNova6 wrote: post #175
alemanek wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am someone with significant experience in Java, C#, C++, and JS/TS. I am a bit of a newbie to Go but have used it for a few things at work. So, I can give a bit of a comparison for you. I really like the DevX and strong standard library of Go. Also I really like that the community around Go has a strong preference for just using the stdlib and not going crazy with third party libraries. Languages are just tools but…

Hey, thanks for the reply. That sounds really nice! I wonder, which aspects of the "Go" std lib are considered strong? Would you say it is more like .net where the std-lib also comes with framework-grade capabilities such as REST-endpoints and setting up applications? Because in the classical sense of a library, I think Java is fantastic (collections, strings, NIO, HTTP 2.0, etc.). But it misses framework-level out-o…

So take this with a big mountain of salt as I am newer to Go and my experience with .Net is a bit dated but I do have 7 YoE with C#.

The C# stdlib is larger and more batteries included for sure. But, it feels less focused than Go to me. Over its history it has supported a ton of different styles of programming. Whereas Go’s maintainers have been, at least so far, more obsessive on keeping the language small.

As a result you get libraries and codebases that have a mix of legacy and modern flavors of .NET. That isn’t the fault of the language but more of its large history and wider scope. GoLang doesn’t have a rich UI library built in for example whereas .NET has 3 if I am remembering correctly.

I like the focus of Go but C# is a great language and .NET is an excellent framework.

Here are some things that I think Go does better though:

- TLS and x509 stdlib is fantastic

- Explicit error returns instead of Exception throwing

- A developer culture around idiomatic Go. It’s subjective but it sets a tone for a single coding style.

- Less “magic”. This is more of a sin of Java frameworks but .NET has lots of higher level abstractions the push lots of interactions behind the curtain.

- tiny docker images and super fast startup.

Here are some things I miss from C#:

- really nice Enums

- Better support for functional programming.

- LINQ to objects

- Annotations, specifically validation logic as annotations.

- JSON handling is more straightforward

.NET is super capable though. Nothing wrong with using it and it is much more broadly applicable than Go in my opinion.

But, I like the ergonomics of Go and for backend services and CLI tools I think it is a strong choice. But, I wouldn’t choose it to build a game or a desktop/mobile GUI application currently.

Re: Go is my hammer, and everything is a nail

#534

Post by jpgvm »

Different strokes for different folks. Used Go for ~5 years, would be happy to never use it again. Typescript is in a similar bucket, lots of professional usage (sadly still using it) would also be happy to never touch it again.

Kotlin/JVM became my hammer and I currently don't feel like there are any gripes I have about it except maybe that the Gradle/Maven dichotomy and associated anxiety that build systems give people makes it harder to sell people on it.

Otherwise language feature wise and runtime wise it's about as good as you are going to ever need for 99.99% of (non-frontend) use cases. You have C++/Rust/Zig to fill in the few places where a runtime isn't viable.

Re: Go is my hammer, and everything is a nail

#535

Post by markusw »

jpgvm wrote: post #534

Different strokes for different folks. Used Go for ~5 years, would be happy to never use it again. Typescript is in a similar bucket, lots of professional usage (sadly still using it) would also be happy to never touch it again. Kotlin/JVM became my hammer and I currently don't feel like there are any gripes I have about it except maybe that the Gradle/Maven dichotomy and associated anxiety that build systems give pe…

I'm happy you found your hammer as well! :D

Re: Go is my hammer, and everything is a nail

#536

Post by sethammons »

kerkeslager wrote: post #378
RandomThoughts3 wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's why I love Go so much. You want to write a very clever library using elegant abstraction and generics to have a cool innovative interface to solve your problem? Tough luck, you can't. So instead, you will just have to write a bog standard implementation with for-loops and good old functions which you will have to copy and tweak as needed where you really need something more complicated. It will work perfectly…

"Simple" is a cop-out word. Things can be simple along a lot of vectors. The vector you've chosen seems to be "does less for you" which taken ad absurdum would have you using assembly. Go does have elegant abstractions, and they aren't the simplest along this vector, nor would anyone want them to be. Coroutines, for example, are actually quite conceptually complicated in some ways. I prefer "understandable"--it appea…

Fwiw I have worked on multiple many hundred of thousands lines of code projects in multiple languages, several of which we rewrote from python, perl, php, and ruby to go where I first maintained the existing code and then worked on a rewrite. I've also walked into existing large Go projects and worked in elixir and some limited js.

In each and every case except one (some contractors did something really odd in trying to write go like java or ruby, can't recall, but the code was terribad), the go version was both more performant and easier to maintain. This is measured by counting bugs, development velocity, and mean time to remediation.

Re: Go is my hammer, and everything is a nail

#537

Post by classified »

afiodorov wrote: post #462

I used to work for a Go shop. We dealt with financial data. I found it so annoying that many of my colleagues would use Go for one-off tasks such as aggregating CSV files, updating the database with some data, or fetching data from the database, and then trying to make a plot. I saw my colleagues again and again implementing basic algorithms such as rolling median, or finding a maximum. Instead of loading data into P…

> Instead of loading data into Pandas and doing a group by

SQL can do `group by`. No need for overkill with "data science tools".

Re: Go is my hammer, and everything is a nail

#538

Post by classified »

theshrike79 wrote: post #511
afiodorov wrote: post #462

I used to work for a Go shop. We dealt with financial data. I found it so annoying that many of my colleagues would use Go for one-off tasks such as aggregating CSV files, updating the database with some data, or fetching data from the database, and then trying to make a plot. I saw my colleagues again and again implementing basic algorithms such as rolling median, or finding a maximum. Instead of loading data into P…

> I used to work for a Go shop. We dealt with financial data. People dealing with finance are THE MOST risk-averse people I know. No new tool will be used without years of vetting and it'll still be blamed if something goes wrong - even if the new tool never touched that bit of the process =) Source: Consulted for a finance company and it was Ye Olde Java and COBOL all the way down =)

I'm surprised they were adventurous enough to use Java.

Re: Go is my hammer, and everything is a nail

#539

Post by GraduateDescent »

tgv wrote: post #430
WuxiFingerHold wrote: post #381

That's why Typescript is my hammer, unless I need a jack hammer, which is Rust. With Deno and Typescript I get an even more versatile toolbox than with Go. And what's even more important to me, Typescript is safer and more ergonomic than Go, but slightly slower. Rust is safer, more ergonomic and faster than Go, but much harder to learn. Especially strict (which is a must) Typescript is underrated. Compared to Go, we…

- Typescript doesn't protect you at all against external data. - A Go program runs single-threaded, unless you explicitly tell it not too, so I don't quite see that as a plus for Typescript. - Go is quite a bit faster than Typescript. - I haven't had a versioning problem in Go, and I can still compile and run old code. Typescript still beats Python in that respect, but Go wins stability. And I say this as someone who…

If you want TS-supported deserialization, just use runtime schema validation. I don't see the issue. It's dead-simple and is the way everyone does it.

Re: Go is my hammer, and everything is a nail

#540

Post by m_a_g »

bborud wrote: post #94

People always under-estimate the cost of properly learning a language. At any given time I tend to have a "main go-to language". I typically spend 2-4 years getting to the point where I can say I "know" a language. Then I try to stick to it long enough for the investment to pay off. Usually 8-10 years. A surprising number of people think this is a very long time. It isn't. This is typically the time it takes to under…

Here is the thing: many software engineers don't need to learn a language "properly."

When you start a new job, there will almost always be an existing code base, and you'll have to make contributions to it. Pattern recognition will get you a long way before you need to dive deep into the language internals.

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