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A person who has written programs in Java or C can probably learn Go in about a day. I really wish people would stop saying this. There is more to Go than jus

A person who has written programs in Java or C can probably learn Go in about a day. I really wish people would stop saying this. There is more to Go than just the syntax. I'm a Go dev on a team of php and Java devs, and just the opinionated philosophy of Go is hard to get across to them. They bypass the Go interview only to create the mess interviews intend to prevent. They are junior/mid devs again, except that because everyone keeps saying Go can be learnt in a day they think they've already mastered it. Go is easy to get started, but there is somewhat more than a day's worth of learning, I see this daily.

wiremine 11y ago
I don't think a day is reasonable either, but 2 weeks is. You get to a point where you just sort of run out of concepts to learn... it's a weird feeling at first, to be honest with you.
- mangeletti 11y ago
  What about for a Python developer with no experience in static/compiled languages?
  - tkinom 11y ago
    I did a simple port of Python program to go a while back. The python program is web backend for JQuery+html Single page web app for front end. It built its own database in the backend on top of SQlite. It is not that hard to part a few features over, ~1-2 weeks including learning time. There are lot of examples on how to do most of typical web programs with REST/AJAX for golang. The REST/JSON in golang is a lot of verbose than python. Go need to define all JSON fields via marshalling which is none-trivial amount of boiler place template code code. It does very strict type check on all incoming JSON structures. I have full functional regression test coverage from my frontend code to the all the python REST APIs /JSON structures. The more stricter type check in REST/JSON in the Golang requires a lot of work while provide little value for me. The error handling the go compare to pyhon is an "acquire taste". (I have to acquire that taste yet.) I was used to the code style of raise/catch exceptions. Python provides extremely good stack trace feedbacks on those error cases. Recover from exceptions in python are trivial. My python code needs to build/handle 10-25 GBytes database. I spent non-trivial amount of time in the low level API of python/C code to optimized/debug memory related issue at that scale. All the issues in python backend were worked out already. The backend python all used very little memory in building and using 20+GB of DB. For Golang, I can not get pass that barrier. Building a DB of about 2-4GB cause the golang app to completely slow down. (Most likely GC kick in, memory hogs on system level.) I spent a few more weeks on golang and can't get enough info to fixed that issue and put that porting from python->Golang project on the shelf. In python I can force a GC operations in certain point of my app to see the memory usage clearly drop down. I can't find a way to do that in golang. There were documented API in golang that supposes to do that. But it just doesn't works for me. That's > 1 years ago.
- logingone 11y ago
  I don't agree. After two weeks people are still unaware of lint, vet, -race, haven't even begun exploring how error values can be managed, ... Interviewees with 6 months of Go are regularly rejected - how is that possible if it's so quick and easy to learn?
  - Rapzid 11y ago
    Most interviewees are rejected anyway. If they have the fundamentals down and are creating a "mess" that sounds like a failure of the existing project leads. A little code review and direction goes a long way.. It doesn't take long to run lint, vet, -race by someone. Establishing best practices and engineering principles for the project/team can help tremendously with on-boarding too.

wiremine 11y ago

I don't think a day is reasonable either, but 2 weeks is. You get to a point where you just sort of run out of concepts to learn... it's a weird feeling at first, to be honest with you.

mangeletti 11y ago
What about for a Python developer with no experience in static/compiled languages?
- tkinom 11y ago
  I did a simple port of Python program to go a while back. The python program is web backend for JQuery+html Single page web app for front end. It built its own database in the backend on top of SQlite. It is not that hard to part a few features over, ~1-2 weeks including learning time. There are lot of examples on how to do most of typical web programs with REST/AJAX for golang. The REST/JSON in golang is a lot of verbose than python. Go need to define all JSON fields via marshalling which is none-trivial amount of boiler place template code code. It does very strict type check on all incoming JSON structures. I have full functional regression test coverage from my frontend code to the all the python REST APIs /JSON structures. The more stricter type check in REST/JSON in the Golang requires a lot of work while provide little value for me. The error handling the go compare to pyhon is an "acquire taste". (I have to acquire that taste yet.) I was used to the code style of raise/catch exceptions. Python provides extremely good stack trace feedbacks on those error cases. Recover from exceptions in python are trivial. My python code needs to build/handle 10-25 GBytes database. I spent non-trivial amount of time in the low level API of python/C code to optimized/debug memory related issue at that scale. All the issues in python backend were worked out already. The backend python all used very little memory in building and using 20+GB of DB. For Golang, I can not get pass that barrier. Building a DB of about 2-4GB cause the golang app to completely slow down. (Most likely GC kick in, memory hogs on system level.) I spent a few more weeks on golang and can't get enough info to fixed that issue and put that porting from python->Golang project on the shelf. In python I can force a GC operations in certain point of my app to see the memory usage clearly drop down. I can't find a way to do that in golang. There were documented API in golang that supposes to do that. But it just doesn't works for me. That's > 1 years ago.
logingone 11y ago
I don't agree. After two weeks people are still unaware of lint, vet, -race, haven't even begun exploring how error values can be managed, ... Interviewees with 6 months of Go are regularly rejected - how is that possible if it's so quick and easy to learn?
- Rapzid 11y ago
  Most interviewees are rejected anyway. If they have the fundamentals down and are creating a "mess" that sounds like a failure of the existing project leads. A little code review and direction goes a long way.. It doesn't take long to run lint, vet, -race by someone. Establishing best practices and engineering principles for the project/team can help tremendously with on-boarding too.