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I've been writing Go daily for almost two years now and outside of wishing for generics a few times I've never struggled to fit a solution into the type system.

I've been writing Go daily for almost two years now and outside of wishing for generics a few times I've never struggled to fit a solution into the type system. I've certainly never considered going back to a duck typed language like Python or Ruby. Not once. Not ever. We have slowly replaced even our glue scripts that are written in Python with Go versions because maintenance and understandability trump any perceived speed advantage of writing something in Python.

IndianAstronaut 10y ago
As soon as a system reaches a given size, not having static types becomes unwieldy. Go's type system is great. Though my code still uses the var type declarations.
- hesdeadjim 10y ago
  The further I get away from Python the smaller that given size limit becomes. After two years? It's at about 100 lines... To me, the power of Go's simplicity is almost always underestimated by the language's detractors. I can look at code my team wrote two years ago and with a few <leader>gd's in Vim I know what's going on. Obviously Python fails this test, but even a high-level static typed language like C# can suffer greatly from all the magic one can invoke (Linq being a great example). What it comes down to is that Go doesn't give you many ways to be clever. Younger me who loved template metaprogramming in C++ would scoff at this statement, but if you go back and have to reverse engineer your own cleverness enough times you really, really start to dislike the practice.
  - mratzloff 10y ago
    Yeah, I find that Go has influenced my code structure for the better in other languages. I'm much more likely to think carefully about a problem and consider alternative approaches for simplicity before just dropping a `template` keyword in C++, for instance. In Ruby, I am far less inclined to reopen classes. Etc.
  - piva00 10y ago
    Exactly what I tell people I like most about Go, even when there are magic things happening (looking at you, Kubernetes source code), it's not NEAR the level that a language like Ruby makes the code look like arcane magic. Python is in between, I can find myself pretty damn well in a big Python codebase after awhile but Ruby... Ruby is a pleasure to write first and get lost later, I've done too much of it to like, all of the metaprogramming is gonna come back and bite your mind chunk by chunk when the codebase gets big enough. Few times I've been more frustrated in my life than when debugging Ruby and thinking "where the hell is this function defined at?" to find out it was some sort of generator stuff spitting out code.

IndianAstronaut 10y ago

As soon as a system reaches a given size, not having static types becomes unwieldy. Go's type system is great. Though my code still uses the var type declarations.

hesdeadjim 10y ago
The further I get away from Python the smaller that given size limit becomes. After two years? It's at about 100 lines... To me, the power of Go's simplicity is almost always underestimated by the language's detractors. I can look at code my team wrote two years ago and with a few <leader>gd's in Vim I know what's going on. Obviously Python fails this test, but even a high-level static typed language like C# can suffer greatly from all the magic one can invoke (Linq being a great example). What it comes down to is that Go doesn't give you many ways to be clever. Younger me who loved template metaprogramming in C++ would scoff at this statement, but if you go back and have to reverse engineer your own cleverness enough times you really, really start to dislike the practice.
- mratzloff 10y ago
  Yeah, I find that Go has influenced my code structure for the better in other languages. I'm much more likely to think carefully about a problem and consider alternative approaches for simplicity before just dropping a `template` keyword in C++, for instance. In Ruby, I am far less inclined to reopen classes. Etc.
- piva00 10y ago
  Exactly what I tell people I like most about Go, even when there are magic things happening (looking at you, Kubernetes source code), it's not NEAR the level that a language like Ruby makes the code look like arcane magic. Python is in between, I can find myself pretty damn well in a big Python codebase after awhile but Ruby... Ruby is a pleasure to write first and get lost later, I've done too much of it to like, all of the metaprogramming is gonna come back and bite your mind chunk by chunk when the codebase gets big enough. Few times I've been more frustrated in my life than when debugging Ruby and thinking "where the hell is this function defined at?" to find out it was some sort of generator stuff spitting out code.