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First chapter of Kernighan and Donovan's new Go book [pdf]

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Re: First chapter of Kernighan and Donovan's new Go book [pdf]

#71

Post by waspleg »

seiji wrote: post #44
chimeracoder wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I know 100x is a huge multiplier, but I've actually tracked myself to the extent possible, and that really is the right order of magnitude for me. There are a number of reasons. I find refactoring is way, way simpler. Refactoring in Python feels painful enough that I always put it off until it gets absolutely necessary. With Go, I find it takes way less time, and also less mental energy. The static typing and s…

The static typing and strict compiler (enforcement of imports and lvalues, etc.) works well for my writing style. It seems you more enjoy just "Not Python" than Go itself. Go is still pretty awful and designed without really consulting what would help users. It's just designed for what the creators want, but now millions of people are trying to use it—not just 8 people inside the Nation of Google. It's getting worse…

Thanks for the link. I'm not a professional programmer but I laughed out loud at The Autistic Gopher Hypothesis.

Re: First chapter of Kernighan and Donovan's new Go book [pdf]

#72

Post by howeman »

Omnipresent wrote: post #9

To those in the Go community: - What is Go well suited for other than network programming? - Why might one decide to write the backend API of their web app in Go, compared to say Grails, Python etc.

I think Go is a great language for sophisticated scientific computing. Go scales well to complex code bases, and thus it is a great language for building an ecosystem. The tools are not all there yet, but the foundations are being built github.com/gonum

Re: First chapter of Kernighan and Donovan's new Go book [pdf]

#73

Post by andmarios »

pm90 wrote: post #16
middleclick wrote: post #5

Question for the Go experts out there: does it make sense to buy this book to learn Go or are there better tutorials/books?

Effective Go is a great intro: https://golang.org/doc/effective_go.html Also, check out the blog posts for more information on specific topics: http://blog.golang.org/ . They are really well written.

^ This! It is one of the reasons I like Go. Effective Go is all you need to understand the language and be able to read even the most complex Go programs.

Re: First chapter of Kernighan and Donovan's new Go book [pdf]

#74

Post by howeman »

microtonal wrote: post #51
chimeracoder wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What is Go well suited for other than network programming? Why might one decide to write the backend API of their web app in Go, compared to say Grails, Python etc. You'll get a lot of different opinions on this. I'll just speak based on my experience, since Python was my primary language before coming to Go. Everything I used to use Python for, I can do faster in Go. The notable exception to this is statistical an…

Everything I used to use Python for, I can do faster in Go. The notable exception to this is statistical analysis, as Go does not have any FORTRAN bindings, whereas Python does (through Numpy & co.). golang does have BLAS bindings through gonum: https://godoc.org/github.com/gonum/blas/cgo Coming back to the main question. I use Go as my primary language these days. E.g., my dependency parser and neural net dependency…

gonum also has LAPACK bindings

godoc.org/github.com/gonum/lapack/cgo

Assuming you need float64, BLAS and LAPACK are most easily accessed through the wrapper packages godoc.org/github.com/gonum/blas/blas64 and godoc.org/github.com/gonum/lapack/lapack64. This way code can be written to either use the native go implementations or the assembly/c/fortran ones.

Re: First chapter of Kernighan and Donovan's new Go book [pdf]

#75

Post by seiji »

Isamu wrote: post #23
realrocker wrote: post #4

From the book: "But it has comparatively few features and is unlikely to add more. For instance, it has no implicit numeric conversions, no constructors or destructors, no operator overloading, no default parameter values, no inheritance, no generics, no exceptions, no macros, no function annotations, and no thread-local storage."

From the preface: "achieving maximum effect with minimum means." Sort of the anti-Perl? I say this as someone who likes both Perl and Go. Go is very contrarian, and I applaud this.

Go is very contrarian, and I applaud this.

It takes more than reversing the order of parameters and using known-braindead ideas like codified tabs-are-good syntax to make contrarian ideas valuable.

Just because you change green lights to mean stop and red lights to mean continue doesn't make contrarian suddenly better than the way things were.

Re: First chapter of Kernighan and Donovan's new Go book [pdf]

#76

Post by MichaelGG »

dekhn wrote: post #61
norswap wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are they actually proud of having no generics? :o

No, the authors specifically said that they would like to have generic features but couldn't figure out a way to implement it without unacceptable performance problems. I'm pretty sure the feature will show up in the next few minor version increments.

Basically they dismissed every implemented approach, despite generics obviously working in other systems. (And it's hardly a "new" feature unless we're counting in multiples of decades.)

Re: First chapter of Kernighan and Donovan's new Go book [pdf]

#77

Post by _kst_ »

rendambathu wrote: post #46

Hope this book is going to be another Epic and Great reference like this gem[1] [1] http://t3.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcTK3WbaQiO5mCmvRGtvc...

The link is to an image of the front cover of K&R2 (Kernighan & Ritchie, "The C Programming Language", 2nd edition). You probably meant the image to show up in your comment, but it didn't.

Re: First chapter of Kernighan and Donovan's new Go book [pdf]

#79

Post by seiji »

chimeracoder wrote: post #62
seiji wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The static typing and strict compiler (enforcement of imports and lvalues, etc.) works well for my writing style. It seems you more enjoy just "Not Python" than Go itself. Go is still pretty awful and designed without really consulting what would help users. It's just designed for what the creators want, but now millions of people are trying to use it—not just 8 people inside the Nation of Google. It's getting worse…

> It seems you more enjoy just "Not Python" than Go itself. No, I have experience with lots of languages. I'm comparing to Python here because that's what OP asked for. I don't think Go is "just designed for what the creators want", but even if it were, I don't care, because that's what I want as well. I'm talking about my personal experience of Go based on my own experience writing Go full-time for over three years,…

With all due respect, it's highly unlikely that a review from someone using it for four days

But, the review goes into a rant about how the Go community just thinks it's the greatest and refuses to listen to outside opinions due to a sense of inbred and ungrounded superiority... kinda like what you just did there.

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