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Four years of Go

blog.golang.org

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Re: Four years of Go

#71

Post by burntsushi »

alok-g wrote: post #53

Those experienced in Go, do you miss generics?

I enjoy writing Go and have done a lot of it over the past couple years, and there are occasions where I miss other kinds of polymorphism. Specifically, parametric and ad-hoc.

However, it doesn't impact whether I enjoy writing Go code or not. It tends to be mitigated by blessed built in types and functions with parametric polymorphism (e.g., `map`, `[]`, `append`, `delete`, etc.) in addition to Go's structural sub-typing and type embedding. First class functions help too.

Actually, this results in a really nice aspect of Go that I've come to appreciate: reading and writing Go code tends to have very little cognitive overhead. Things tend to be very straight-forward and clear. I'm not sure if this is because there aren't generics, but I have my suspicions that it is. The language itself and its semantics is very simple and can fit in your head easily. But this is my experience, YMMV.

Dirty little secret: sometimes I cheat a little when writing small commands in Go and sacrifice compile time type safety by using my `ty` package.[1]

[1] - http://blog.burntsushi.net/type-parametric-functions-golang

Re: Four years of Go

#72

Post by kaib »

_delirium wrote: post #69
sergiotapia wrote: post #13

I'm betting on Go at the moment, using it to build some little libraries and writing some dummy apps to test the waters. Hopefully in 4 years when Golang developers are in demand, I have 4 years of experience under my belt. :)

By then you'll need at least 10 years of Go experience to qualify for the job postings. ;-)

That is almost doable, but would be exceptional unless your name is Rob, Robert or Ken. I think I could almost claim 9 years at that point, conveniently ignoring the fact I stopped coding a few years back.. :-)

Re: Four years of Go

#73

Post by genwin »

sillysaurus2 wrote: post #48
aaronblohowiak wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Takes me about 10-20% longer to do trivial things in go than ruby, but the results are much faster and bigger refactorings are also much faster to complete (nice type system). The ability to really max your perf out in short amount of time is also delightful

My experience with Go was bizarre -- I loved programming in it, but I don't understand why! For example, Go has no REPL. (It's difficult for statically-typed languages to provide one.) It's commonly believed that a REPL is valuable and increases productivity. So if you were offered the choice, is there any circumstance in which "no REPL" is equally powerful as having one? Well, the vast majority of great hackers seem…

Less is often more! I prefer the Go Playground over a REPL, especially since I can easily see others' code snippets running using the Playground's Share feature. My 2nd favorite thing about Go (after its runtime speed) is its compiler and excellent error messages that let me quickly realize what mistake I made.

Re: Four years of Go

#74

Post by jodrellblank »

benatkin wrote: post #54
sillysaurus2 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My experience with Go was bizarre -- I loved programming in it, but I don't understand why! For example, Go has no REPL. (It's difficult for statically-typed languages to provide one.) It's commonly believed that a REPL is valuable and increases productivity. So if you were offered the choice, is there any circumstance in which "no REPL" is equally powerful as having one? Well, the vast majority of great hackers seem…

Perl and PHP are also open source languages were people don't use repls often. Java and C# don't have repls either. I don't think everyone has ever thought they needed a REPL for any reasonable definition of everyone .

C# from Microsoft doesn't have a REPL, but C# with Mono does: http://www.mono-project.com/CsharpRepl

Re: Four years of Go

#75

Post by dhaivatpandya »

I'm currently working on a Go project that is meant to sit above the Hadoop FS. Go has been absolutely brilliant to work with. Some of the design decisions make very little sense at first (e.g. no fields in interfaces, no real inheritance, etc.) but as I've used the language more and more, the reasoning behind them becomes clear.

Re: Four years of Go

#77

Post by prewett »

columbo wrote: post #63
codeka wrote: post #60

When I look at the Google Trends for "golang", China is the top region by a huge margin (the next highest region after China is Sweden at 30) [ http://i.imgur.com/XHW40kp.png ]. And the rise of interest in "golang" in general seems to correspond to the massive spike in China [ http://i.imgur.com/Y3oO2jf.png ]. I'm not really sure what that means...

Could just be false signals for people googling "Go" the game and not the language. Golang is the first search on a generic search for "Go" ( https://www.google.com.hk/webhp?hl=zh-CN&sa=N&tab=lw#hl=zh-C... ).

People in China that are searching for the game would probably be searching for "weiqi" or "围棋". "Go" comes from the Japanese word for the game, "igo".

Also, in my experience, very few (mainland) Chinese play weiqi. Everyone plays Chinese chess, but very few play Go. So people searching for "go" are quite likely searching for the language. (Although I'd expect that the people who know about the language know enough to search for "golang", so who knows)

Re: Four years of Go

#78

Post by jacques_chester »

miloshadzic wrote: post #16
dmak wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you go into detail on your experiences for Go compared to JS or Ruby?

I know Ruby and some Go and never really understood why people compare them so much. Very different languages.

On HN there's a lot of people who went from writing Ruby to writing Go. If all you have are a hammer and a screwdriver, everything looks like a blog post comparing the two tools you've tried.

Re: Four years of Go

#79

Post by chongli »

coldtea wrote: post #49
dbaupp wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

None of the languages being compared against were released in the ubiquitous-internet age with things like Github and widespread blogging to drive interest and adoption.

> None of the languages being compared against were released in the ubiquitous-internet age with things like Github and widespread blogging to drive interest and adoption. Which doesn't seem to matter anyway. There are tons of languages released every year that fare even worse than languages released in 1980, despite having "ubiquitous-internet, Github and widespread blogging" at their disposal.

There are tons of languages released every year that fare even worse than languages released in 1980, despite having "ubiquitous-internet, Github and widespread blogging" at their disposal.

Those tools are force multipliers. If the initial force is zero, the output is still going to be zero.

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