4 ms·

Good points, and also correct answer. Identity is hard to question. But when you try Go without prejudice, it's just fun (and productive) afterwards.

isido 10y ago
With golang, it is incredibly easy to get productive fast. It's like modernized, safe C with good standard library and trivial deployment. Those are pretty good selling points for getting stuff actually done. Using Haskell for similar stuff is more tedious, even if a actual coding is more fun. I can see (and sometimes feel myself) the cognitive dissonance here.
- sievebrain 10y ago
  I think the issue here is that you're comparing Go to C and Haskell. C is decades old. Haskell was designed to help you write correct programs, rather than simplicity of use or productivity (or that's how I'd characterise it). If you compared Go to C# or Java 8 or Scala, it'd probably look a lot worse. Deployment isn't so difficult that Go has any advantage in my experience: install a JVM on the server, ensure your build system is producing a fat jar, run it. Done. With Capsule you can even make self-executable JARs that have a little shell script attached. Then you can run the program like any other UNIX app. chmod +x and ./execute it. Fully self contained, and can even update itself automatically.
  - jjuel 10y ago
    I use C# at work, and I use Go at home. I really do like C#, but there is a reason I am using Go at home. I find I am more productive, and can develop better code faster with Go even though I am very new with Go.
    - sievebrain 10y ago
      I'm curious which parts of Go you find more productive than C#. Visual Studio slows you down?
- ultramancool 10y ago
  > Using Haskell for similar stuff is more tedious, even if a actual coding is more fun. I can see (and sometimes feel myself) the cognitive dissonance here. I don't think the same could be said for say, Scala or F# which offer many of the same paradigms but in a more flexible way though.
kasey_junk 10y ago
I work in Go full time, so i don't know if that counts as without prejudice. But I do not think it is fun or particularly productive (if measured by the amount of stuff i can get done in a particular set of programming time). I'd say I haven't used a language I was less productive in or that I enjoyed less since Java 1. What I think Go has done for me, is crystalize a belief I was already leaning towards, which is that a language being productive or fun is a lot less important than standards cutting through the issues that don't matter. Not arguing about the best way to format code, or which test library to use, or how to share memory across threads is what makes Go valuable. It is implied that the language has to be this bad to achieve that, which is the open question to me.

isido 10y ago

With golang, it is incredibly easy to get productive fast. It's like modernized, safe C with good standard library and trivial deployment. Those are pretty good selling points for getting stuff actually done. Using Haskell for similar stuff is more tedious, even if a actual coding is more fun. I can see (and sometimes feel myself) the cognitive dissonance here.

sievebrain 10y ago
I think the issue here is that you're comparing Go to C and Haskell. C is decades old. Haskell was designed to help you write correct programs, rather than simplicity of use or productivity (or that's how I'd characterise it). If you compared Go to C# or Java 8 or Scala, it'd probably look a lot worse. Deployment isn't so difficult that Go has any advantage in my experience: install a JVM on the server, ensure your build system is producing a fat jar, run it. Done. With Capsule you can even make self-executable JARs that have a little shell script attached. Then you can run the program like any other UNIX app. chmod +x and ./execute it. Fully self contained, and can even update itself automatically.
- jjuel 10y ago
  I use C# at work, and I use Go at home. I really do like C#, but there is a reason I am using Go at home. I find I am more productive, and can develop better code faster with Go even though I am very new with Go.
  - sievebrain 10y ago
    I'm curious which parts of Go you find more productive than C#. Visual Studio slows you down?
ultramancool 10y ago
> Using Haskell for similar stuff is more tedious, even if a actual coding is more fun. I can see (and sometimes feel myself) the cognitive dissonance here. I don't think the same could be said for say, Scala or F# which offer many of the same paradigms but in a more flexible way though.

kasey_junk 10y ago

I work in Go full time, so i don't know if that counts as without prejudice. But I do not think it is fun or particularly productive (if measured by the amount of stuff i can get done in a particular set of programming time). I'd say I haven't used a language I was less productive in or that I enjoyed less since Java 1. What I think Go has done for me, is crystalize a belief I was already leaning towards, which is that a language being productive or fun is a lot less important than standards cutting through the issues that don't matter. Not arguing about the best way to format code, or which test library to use, or how to share memory across threads is what makes Go valuable. It is implied that the language has to be this bad to achieve that, which is the open question to me.