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IMO the Go goal is to be an enhancement of C. It is not as expressive as some existing languages (i.e., Go programs may be longer), but it is very good for tran

by ptero 10y ago

IMO the Go goal is to be an enhancement of C. It is not as expressive as some existing languages (i.e., Go programs may be longer), but it is very good for translating clearly thought through logic into efficient machine code. It supports some of the features that original C lacks (networking, parallelism, channels, etc.), which to me is a very good thing. With minimal forethought this allows writing programs that can be massively scaled later without impeding initial checkouts at small data sets. Eventually the success or failure may be determined by the libraries developed by the user community. For example, fortran survived so long not because it was a good language, but because it had freely available, easy to use world class libraries for numerical computation. Many grad students kept using Fortran given the choice of an existing, working, ugly-ish code that they could use for their PhD projects vs redeveloping and retesting the same functionality from scratch.

Taek 10y ago
In my experience writing go is very fast and reading go is also very fast. The language was designed to be very comfortable, and they did a great job with that. You sit down to write something and you don't have to think too much about the best way to tackle the problem, the lines of code just flow from your fingertips. There's mostly one way to do everything, which makes doing things easy. Code review is much the same.
- tejasmanohar 10y ago
  I feel the same. Go is a different type of terse. I think terseness goes beyond the number of lines. When I skim Go code, I can grasp the meaning of it very quickly.
  - sjellis 10y ago
    I've seen talks where Rob Pike describes Go as being "light on the page" vs. "noisy", meaning (I think) that it doesn't have lots of sigils and annotation bits around the code.
- oscargrouch 10y ago
  And those are the secret ingredients of a great language for team programming. And thats why Go will dominate the market that once was meant for Java.
  - tigershark 10y ago
    I really hope not, there is already a lot of awful code around written in Java. I can't imagine codebases on the MLOC range written in a language even worse than java 1.4 (it didn't have generics, but at least it had exceptions)
    - bitmapbrother 10y ago
      There are MLOC of awful code in every language including your favorite.
    - oscargrouch 10y ago
      "bussiness" languages will never change. It will be Cobol, Java, C#, Go, and then something like that in the future. The truth is, theres not enough smart people to do things in the hundreds or thousands in a more sophisticated language. And also speaking of smartness, sometimes, using simple tools, can help you focus on algorithms. Linus and crew coded the whole Linux in C, a language with very few resources, and considered pretty ugly by today's standard. So i can see the beauty of that, even when you are able to use any sort of more sophisticated language, sometimes chosing something that can be shared with more people can pay off, instead of a more "elitist" language, with a higher barrier of entry. And also lets not forget, that theres always some economics at play. Where companies not focused in IT will choose tech that can scale by the number of employees, do its job and be cheap as possible. I think there will be no antidote for that. It will always be some reincarnation of Java.
    - geodel 10y ago
      There are already MLOC projects in Go like Kubernetes, Docker etc.
- ashark 10y ago
  The legibility and simplicity are my favorite things about Go. I know that I can fearlessly dive into other people's source to figure out what's going on without running into 15 levels of indirection hell and a bunch of language features/idioms that I'm not familiar with for one reason or another.
solidsnack9000 10y ago
Libraries may be a stumbling block for Go, though, because C interop is somewhat slow. Photoshop, Python, Postgres, &c are not all likely to support plugin/extension interfaces based on Go calling convention anytime soon.

by ptero 10y ago

Taek 10y ago

In my experience writing go is very fast and reading go is also very fast. The language was designed to be very comfortable, and they did a great job with that. You sit down to write something and you don't have to think too much about the best way to tackle the problem, the lines of code just flow from your fingertips. There's mostly one way to do everything, which makes doing things easy. Code review is much the same.

tejasmanohar 10y ago
I feel the same. Go is a different type of terse. I think terseness goes beyond the number of lines. When I skim Go code, I can grasp the meaning of it very quickly.
- sjellis 10y ago
  I've seen talks where Rob Pike describes Go as being "light on the page" vs. "noisy", meaning (I think) that it doesn't have lots of sigils and annotation bits around the code.
oscargrouch 10y ago
And those are the secret ingredients of a great language for team programming. And thats why Go will dominate the market that once was meant for Java.
- tigershark 10y ago
  I really hope not, there is already a lot of awful code around written in Java. I can't imagine codebases on the MLOC range written in a language even worse than java 1.4 (it didn't have generics, but at least it had exceptions)
  - bitmapbrother 10y ago
    There are MLOC of awful code in every language including your favorite.
  - oscargrouch 10y ago
    "bussiness" languages will never change. It will be Cobol, Java, C#, Go, and then something like that in the future. The truth is, theres not enough smart people to do things in the hundreds or thousands in a more sophisticated language. And also speaking of smartness, sometimes, using simple tools, can help you focus on algorithms. Linus and crew coded the whole Linux in C, a language with very few resources, and considered pretty ugly by today's standard. So i can see the beauty of that, even when you are able to use any sort of more sophisticated language, sometimes chosing something that can be shared with more people can pay off, instead of a more "elitist" language, with a higher barrier of entry. And also lets not forget, that theres always some economics at play. Where companies not focused in IT will choose tech that can scale by the number of employees, do its job and be cheap as possible. I think there will be no antidote for that. It will always be some reincarnation of Java.
  - geodel 10y ago
    There are already MLOC projects in Go like Kubernetes, Docker etc.
ashark 10y ago
The legibility and simplicity are my favorite things about Go. I know that I can fearlessly dive into other people's source to figure out what's going on without running into 15 levels of indirection hell and a bunch of language features/idioms that I'm not familiar with for one reason or another.

solidsnack9000 10y ago

Libraries may be a stumbling block for Go, though, because C interop is somewhat slow. Photoshop, Python, Postgres, &c are not all likely to support plugin/extension interfaces based on Go calling convention anytime soon.