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I Want Off Mr. Golang's Wild Ride

fasterthanli.me

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Re: I Want Off Mr. Golang's Wild Ride

#61

Post by eithed »

umvi wrote: post #2

Maybe I'm a zealot, but I don't really consider "doesn't work as well on windows" a con of a language. C# is (or at least used to be) utter garbage on Linux compared to Windows. I don't hold that against C#, but rather recognize that Linux/Windows are very different, and that compiler maintenance and development is non-trivial (and obviously Microsoft is going to prioritize Windows). This article is basically a rant…

Then don't support it at all instead of trying to support it and failing half way

Re: I Want Off Mr. Golang's Wild Ride

#62

Post by busterarm »

fhood wrote: post #35
gameswithgo wrote: post #18

A lot of people seem to be missing an overarching point, which is the benefits of a language having Sum types, so that edge cases can be represented clearly, and in a way where the consumer of the api can't fail to know they exist, and can't fail to handle them. Anyone thinking of making a new language today, should really get some familiarity with Option and Result types. They make so many things not only safer, but…

I surprises me that most people here aren't up in arms in agreement with this point. Code that is silently incorrect is an absolute disaster on an enterprise level. I spend a lot of time writing seemingly redundant double and triple error checking into my code, only to have the designers of the LANGUAGE say, "yeah, most filepaths are utf-8 so seems good enough to me".

There's a huge cult of Golang being the "one true way" right now and any logic that could potentially contradict that is going to cause folks to throw the blinders up.

Your point about that being a disaster in enterprise is exactly correct and I have huge misgivings about these people above writing the large majority of our software architecture. This is after we switched to Go from Java where these same people did some of the same things.

Lesson not learned.

Re: I Want Off Mr. Golang's Wild Ride

#63

Post by jayd16 »

jerf wrote: post #44
fhood wrote: post #22

The author spent a lot of time dwelling on Window's filesystems, at which point many of the readers got bored and started commenting. There are actually a couple of excellent points in here, the majority of which relate to Go's tendency to just be silently completely wrong in its behaviors from time to time, and is absolutely packed with hidden gotchas.

The problem is... and a lot of people aren't going to like this, including the original author... a lot of those particular gotchas are there for a reason. The author overestimates how much of them are intrinsic to the language, in my opinion. This is a cross-platform file interface, and we've had those for years. What we tend to discover is that if you do write something precisely correct on each platform, you lose…

This is a lot of words about how a cross platform library is good. The author never said otherwise.

The complaints are about how the libraries as implemented are subtly wrong and use simplicity as an excuse.

Re: I Want Off Mr. Golang's Wild Ride

#64

Post by madhadron »

> The Go way is to half-ass things.

This used to be known as the New Jersey school, and is the underlying philosophy of Unix: build a bunch of little pieces that work a lot of the time and kind of fit together if you remember the gotchas, then call it a day. There is an essay on this that I am unable to locate right now which mentions the horror of someone working on ITS when they asked how Unix solved a rollback on error case in a system call and were told, "Oh, we just leave it inconsistent, and the application programmer has to deal with it."

Does anyone else remember this citation? I truly am failing to find it this morning.

Re: I Want Off Mr. Golang's Wild Ride

#66

Post by bartwe »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #32
fortytw2 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I absolutely agree. The one time I had the great misfortune of building software for windows I was extremely happy to see Go worked at all. Linux and OS X largely work the same way due to their shared Unix-ness and pretty much everyone I’ve ever met or talked with uses Go on one of those two platforms. If you have to develop software primarily for Windows, maybe don’t use Go - it’s easily the least actively maintaine…

No one expects iOS to run on Windows. But given that there's a Windows version of Go, it's reasonable that it should work. And also, the points about metadata and path management are spot on. It's 2020. Languages should not be assuming that paths are byte strings. Unix-think is a bug, not a feature. A good language should abstract the file system, not just put a teeny tiny wrapper of modesty around it.

Stuff exists on those file systems outside of your application, and at some point you'll have to interface with them.

Re: I Want Off Mr. Golang's Wild Ride

#67

Post by skrebbel »

madhadron wrote: post #64

> The Go way is to half-ass things. This used to be known as the New Jersey school, and is the underlying philosophy of Unix: build a bunch of little pieces that work a lot of the time and kind of fit together if you remember the gotchas, then call it a day. There is an essay on this that I am unable to locate right now which mentions the horror of someone working on ITS when they asked how Unix solved a rollback on…

Sounds like it might be straight from the original "worse is better" essay:

http://dreamsongs.com/RiseOfWorseIsBetter.html

> The MIT guy did not see any code that handled this case and asked the New Jersey guy how the problem was handled. The New Jersey guy said that the Unix folks were aware of the problem, but the solution was for the system routine to always finish, but sometimes an error code would be returned that signaled that the system routine had failed to complete its action. A correct user program, then, had to check the error code to determine whether to simply try the system routine again. The MIT guy did not like this solution because it was not the right thing.

Re: I Want Off Mr. Golang's Wild Ride

#68

Post by SlowRobotAhead »

fhood wrote: post #22

The author spent a lot of time dwelling on Window's filesystems, at which point many of the readers got bored and started commenting. There are actually a couple of excellent points in here, the majority of which relate to Go's tendency to just be silently completely wrong in its behaviors from time to time, and is absolutely packed with hidden gotchas.

> at which point many of the readers got bored

I don’t know Go or Rust, and yes, I did almost get bored and quit the article.

However... glad I powered through because the 169 dependency packages that ended up bringing in GRPC and this Protobuffers and the kitchen sink was worth the read. In a 0.00% acceptable conclusion. The language shouldn’t encourage this imo.

I get the idea. But I’m coming from embedded so when I see they have a 32bit argument with 4.29 billion options to represent a boolean, well, no sir I can’t get behind that at all :)

Likewise I think the author would have been well to leave Rust out of it most of the time. Your gripes with x should be independent of “y lang does it better” aside from just knowing it is possible to be better.

Re: I Want Off Mr. Golang's Wild Ride

#69

Post by kissgyorgy »

If you don't care about Windows, half of the rant is just not interesting for you. So even if you accept that he is right in every single point, excluding those parts there these are not a lot of problems. EVERY language has problems, even Rust.

Re: I Want Off Mr. Golang's Wild Ride

#70

Post by simscitizen »

madhadron wrote: post #64

> The Go way is to half-ass things. This used to be known as the New Jersey school, and is the underlying philosophy of Unix: build a bunch of little pieces that work a lot of the time and kind of fit together if you remember the gotchas, then call it a day. There is an essay on this that I am unable to locate right now which mentions the horror of someone working on ITS when they asked how Unix solved a rollback on…

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_better

And I happen to agree with it.

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