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Why I Don't Like Golang (2016)

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Re: Why I Don't Like Golang (2016)

#61

Post by mi100hael »

sdegutis wrote: post #45
losingthefight wrote: post #6

I have been using Go in production since 2015 and can honestly say that other than the ternary operator, none of these have been a major issue for me. Granted, I am doing mostly REST API development so my use cases may be different, but I have never had an issue with capitalization or which interfaces are implemented. The tooling is by far some of the best I have used in a language. Paired with a good editor (I perso…

If you're just writing a REST API, I wonder, why did you choose Go for this instead of Java or Python?

I also prefer writing REST APIs in Go.

- Compared to Java: Ecosystem is way over-engineered. You might get along just fine without writing a bunch of boilerplate and factories and XML configs, but sooner or later you're probably going to pull in some dependency that does and have to deal with a bunch of clunky APIs and other annoyances.

- Python: Possibly the only language that's even worse at dependency management than Go. Installs packages globally. The solution is to create a "virtual environment" which is code for hacking up your PATH.

- Node: I dislike the quirks of Javascript like remembering the difference between == and ===, undefined vs null, etc. I haven't used Typescript which may solve some of those language issues. I also dislike dealing with promises/callbacks for so many operations.

I like Go because:

- I can compile to a single statically-linked binary and cross-compile for other platforms

- I can choose to either vendor dependencies or use go-dep to create a dependency lockfile. I can have multiple GOPATHs with minimal magic.

- The "go" CLI handles pretty much everything I need without an explicit config file like pom.xml or package.json.

- The language lacks features. There is no magic. Way more so than even Python, there is one obvious way to do things and there's even an official style guide, so it's easy to jump into someone else's code and understand exactly what's going on immediately. After working with Scala professionally for a few years, I firmly believe this to be a feature, not a flaw.

- The standard library is incredibly comprehensive. It's completely possible to write a web service without importing a single external dependency. There has been a lot of thought put into library APIs for things like byte Readers/Writers and HTTP handlers, to the point that external libraries still usually stick to these standard interfaces. Contrast that with a language like Python where urllib sucks so everyone uses requests.

Re: Why I Don't Like Golang (2016)

#62

Post by jayd16 »

_fx6v wrote: post #57
sdegutis wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're just writing a REST API, I wonder, why did you choose Go for this instead of Java or Python?

I can comment on this on my own: 1. Java - did not want to adopt the entire ecosystem. This is very much wanted a banana and got the whole jungle with a gorilla type of story. 2. Python - dynamic. Don't want that. Go's minimal typing is perfect. It's easy to deploy (binaries). It's fast. It can scale well. It's opinionated (love this). Python and Java both encourage and allow developers to flex creative solutions tha…

You can write small Java services. You really don't need Spring or anything. You should try it some time.

Re: Why I Don't Like Golang (2016)

#63

Post by axaxs »

gerbilly wrote: post #31

Does anyone remember reading K&R for the first time? To me seemed like C was such a tight, perfect little design. Only thirty keywords, and simple consistent semantics.¹ When I first learned it, it was still pre ANSI, and you declared a function like this int f(a) char *a { } The ANSI style function declaration was maybe the only innovation that came after that that significantly improved the language. I remember in…

Same here. K&R C is probably still my favorite programming book. I will admit that most of the examples I had to stop and think about, they all seemed 'cleverly' written. But in each case, it gave me pause, and taught me a new, often simpler way.

Re: Why I Don't Like Golang (2016)

#64

Post by jayd16 »

mi100hael wrote: post #61
sdegutis wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're just writing a REST API, I wonder, why did you choose Go for this instead of Java or Python?

I also prefer writing REST APIs in Go. - Compared to Java: Ecosystem is way over-engineered. You might get along just fine without writing a bunch of boilerplate and factories and XML configs, but sooner or later you're probably going to pull in some dependency that does and have to deal with a bunch of clunky APIs and other annoyances. - Python: Possibly the only language that's even worse at dependency management t…

I see this complaint against Java a lot. If you're going to slum it in a language with no ecosystem so you don't feel overwhelmed, why not just use less of the Java ecosystem?

Re: Why I Don't Like Golang (2016)

#65

Post by jayd16 »

sdegutis wrote: post #56
losingthefight wrote: post #6

I have been using Go in production since 2015 and can honestly say that other than the ternary operator, none of these have been a major issue for me. Granted, I am doing mostly REST API development so my use cases may be different, but I have never had an issue with capitalization or which interfaces are implemented. The tooling is by far some of the best I have used in a language. Paired with a good editor (I perso…

The "Capitalization feature" is actually objectively worse because of the reason OP mentioned, of having to rename all semi-local usages when visibility changes. But good IDEs can help mitigate the difficulty of this. But even more significant is that the Go authors cannot seem to grasp the importance of pre-existing conventions. Almost every language I've used in the past decade allows and encourages the variable, C…

WRT renaming, I find that refactoring code is often such an oversight from language designers. I consider C# to be an elegant language in this way. Public fields and properties look the same in C# so you can effortlessly refactor between them, for example. I wish more languages thought about this stuff.

Re: Why I Don't Like Golang (2016)

#66

Post by sdegutis »

jayd16 wrote: post #65
sdegutis wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "Capitalization feature" is actually objectively worse because of the reason OP mentioned, of having to rename all semi-local usages when visibility changes. But good IDEs can help mitigate the difficulty of this. But even more significant is that the Go authors cannot seem to grasp the importance of pre-existing conventions. Almost every language I've used in the past decade allows and encourages the variable, C…

WRT renaming, I find that refactoring code is often such an oversight from language designers. I consider C# to be an elegant language in this way. Public fields and properties look the same in C# so you can effortlessly refactor between them, for example. I wish more languages thought about this stuff.

I liked a similar aspect of Ruby: attributes and 0-args methods had the same syntax, so you could easily refactor a static field into a method that returns a dynamically calculated value. Overall I don't like that feature, but that was a very handy aspect of it.

Re: Why I Don't Like Golang (2016)

#67

Post by sdegutis »

jayd16 wrote: post #64
mi100hael wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also prefer writing REST APIs in Go. - Compared to Java: Ecosystem is way over-engineered. You might get along just fine without writing a bunch of boilerplate and factories and XML configs, but sooner or later you're probably going to pull in some dependency that does and have to deal with a bunch of clunky APIs and other annoyances. - Python: Possibly the only language that's even worse at dependency management t…

I see this complaint against Java a lot. If you're going to slum it in a language with no ecosystem so you don't feel overwhelmed, why not just use less of the Java ecosystem?

Not OP, but in my experience, it's harder to know how to get from System.out.println("hello world") to GET / in a browser showing "hello world", without adopting some intensely documented framework and infrastructure, along with obscure XML configuration files. I liked that aspect of Clojure, but I wouldn't have a clue how to achieve the same thing in pure Java.

Re: Why I Don't Like Golang (2016)

#68

Post by ryl00 »

gerbilly wrote: post #31

Does anyone remember reading K&R for the first time? To me seemed like C was such a tight, perfect little design. Only thirty keywords, and simple consistent semantics.¹ When I first learned it, it was still pre ANSI, and you declared a function like this int f(a) char *a { } The ANSI style function declaration was maybe the only innovation that came after that that significantly improved the language. I remember in…

> The ANSI style function declaration was maybe the only innovation that came after that that significantly improved the language.

"const" as well (back ported from C++ ?). And being able to declare variables anywhere (instead of just at the beginning of a block)

Re: Why I Don't Like Golang (2016)

#69

Post by mi100hael »

jayd16 wrote: post #64
mi100hael wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also prefer writing REST APIs in Go. - Compared to Java: Ecosystem is way over-engineered. You might get along just fine without writing a bunch of boilerplate and factories and XML configs, but sooner or later you're probably going to pull in some dependency that does and have to deal with a bunch of clunky APIs and other annoyances. - Python: Possibly the only language that's even worse at dependency management t…

I see this complaint against Java a lot. If you're going to slum it in a language with no ecosystem so you don't feel overwhelmed, why not just use less of the Java ecosystem?

It's not always clear how to do that. Sure, in theory it's possible to manually download JARs, configure your classpath, and run javac. In practice, the wisdom seems to be to replace the old ecosystem with a new ecosystem like Maven -> Gradle or Spring -> Spring Boot.

In comparison, the entire standard build process for a Go program is:

    $ export GOPATH="/path/to/repo" && go get && go build && ./main
No config files with some DSL to learn or handwritten XML, no weird class loader behavior to track down, no tuning memory limits or any of that stuff that is just par for the course in Java.

Re: Why I Don't Like Golang (2016)

#70

Post by WalterBright »

AlchemistCamp wrote: post #44
gerbilly wrote: post #31

Does anyone remember reading K&R for the first time? To me seemed like C was such a tight, perfect little design. Only thirty keywords, and simple consistent semantics.¹ When I first learned it, it was still pre ANSI, and you declared a function like this int f(a) char *a { } The ANSI style function declaration was maybe the only innovation that came after that that significantly improved the language. I remember in…

I just started digging into C a few years ago and was struck by the same. It's amazingly simple and the only "flaw" that leaps out at me is the precedence of & and | being higher than comparison operators. Other than that, and maybe the macro system, everything frustrating about learning it was due to the frustration of dealing with the machine rather than anything C itself imposed on me.

I love C, but it's biggest mistake is clearly the unstoppable decay of arrays to pointers:

https://www.digitalmars.com/articles/b44.html

A mistake that C++ missed an opportunity to fix.

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