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> If you work in a job that forces the use of a less powerful language than what you've been exposed to, you can, I think, go through a sort of depression. You

by camus2 10y ago

> If you work in a job that forces the use of a less powerful language than what you've been exposed to, you can, I think, go through a sort of depression. You simply long to use the tools that you know hold much more power yet must resign yourself to the tools you have. I was forced to use go for a job, it actually made me feel stupider, so much that I didn't know how to use the right types anymore when i moved back to a more sophisticated language. I was afraid the language wouldn't let me do what I want, just like Go. There will be a "go programmer generation" and it's not going to be pretty. If people deem "generics too complicated to understand", what can you expect from programmers who don't want to learn anything? The only thing I find nice about the language is implicit interfaces. But not at all cost.

jwdunne 10y ago
I am forced to use PHP at work. I hope that the stimulation I throw at my brain on lunch breaks and evenings offsets what you describe. Maybe it isn't enough and I'm on a long road down towards a point of no return. That said if I look back on the past 6 months, I believe I have improved. In fact, a core principle I hold dear goes as follows: "If I look back 6 months and I'm not any better, there's a big problem". At one point, it seemed to annoy my non-technical boss because he couldn't understand why some of the code I wrote 6 months ago is perhaps not as good as it could be. He has kept me around so maybe it isn't a bad thing :) We will, I think, always have programmers who don't want to learn anything new. It's interesting that there exists "Continuing Professional Development points" in the UK for healthcare: you get a rebate for each hour spent on courses to further your education. Maybe software engineering would benefit from this given the amount of, quite significant, cost sunk into large scale projects. Their universal credit programme should be incentive enough. Entirely different problem though. If not Go, then what?
andmarios 10y ago
So, do people who write timeseries databases in Go (like influxdb and prometheus), people who solve complex infrastructure problems (like k8s and docker), people who do distributed software (like consul) feel stupider because they write in Go?
- kuschku 10y ago
  A good engineer can build a bridge out of rotten trees. But they could still build a better bridge, in less time, with proper materials.
  - cube2222 10y ago
    You know, I think, maybe it's not a coincidence that almost all high-scale infrastructure tooling is written in Go nowadays.
    - kuschku 10y ago
      Almost all high-scale infrastructure tooling? Are there many databases, parallelism frameworks, indexing systems, or machine learning frameworks in go? I’d be interested if you can name any fields where non-Google go projects dominate. I only know of containers.
      - cube2222 10y ago
        Service Discovery and configuration (Consul, etcd), Monitoring (Prometheus and Influx), non-container cluster management (Nomad), databases (CockroachDB), messaging (NATS, Jocko), Terraform. Other than that, I think everybody noticed the frequent posts "xxx database written in Go". Also, most high scale computing companies now use Go for their infrastructure parts. EDIT: You can also check out all the stuff the CoreOS team puts out.
        kuschku 10y ago
        I’ve actually never used any of them, and none of the devs or ops people I usually talk to used them either. We never even heard of any of those except for CockroachDB. Are you sure these are "dominating the entire industry"-products, as you mentioned before? Or is it more that they’re only used in SV?
        cube2222 10y ago
cube2222 10y ago
Go has a lot of advantages. Yes, you are a little bit limmited sometimes because of the lack of generics and the like, but at the same time, if you learn to use Go interfaces well, you end up using them most of the time happily. The parallelism primitives are great too. As much as I love complex type systems, pattern matching, algebraic data types etc., I know that if Go had those things, it wouldn't be the language I love to write everyday anymore. Somehow, Go is a really practical language and you end up being very productive in it, at least from my experience. Saying that people who write Go should be stupid is shallow thinking. Complex languages aren't the only complexity that you should have. Some people concentrate on sophisticated architectural design (like Kubernetes). There is one thing in Go, that I haven't met anywhere else. I can really understand any codebase I stumble upon in a matter of seconds. This is a huge boon to productivity. Anyways, I never had any problems switching between Go and languages like F# or Scala on a daily basis. Rust looks interesting, though I think it will end up being too complex for a lot of people to understand, which will hinder its growth.
- pka 10y ago
  > There is one thing in Go, that I haven't met anywhere else. I can really understand any codebase I stumble upon in a matter of seconds. Care to elaborate a bit more? I understand that when you see for(...) { b[i] = f(a[i]); } then you instinctively know that it's a loop that maps over some sequence, and so on. But let's say you have a 50-100kloc codebase with a 100 files in it. In what unique to Go way does Go help you understand the big picture/coarse architecture of such a project?
  - cube2222 10y ago
    Oh, that it doesn't. I meant smaller parts of code, and not for loops actually. (I prefer maps, filters etc.). Things like gofmt and the simplicity (in that, small number of concepts) of the language lead to most people writing fairly idiomatic code. This way most codebases look the same and you read each other's code as it were yours.
    - matwood 10y ago

by camus2 10y ago

jwdunne 10y ago

I am forced to use PHP at work. I hope that the stimulation I throw at my brain on lunch breaks and evenings offsets what you describe. Maybe it isn't enough and I'm on a long road down towards a point of no return. That said if I look back on the past 6 months, I believe I have improved. In fact, a core principle I hold dear goes as follows: "If I look back 6 months and I'm not any better, there's a big problem". At one point, it seemed to annoy my non-technical boss because he couldn't understand why some of the code I wrote 6 months ago is perhaps not as good as it could be. He has kept me around so maybe it isn't a bad thing :) We will, I think, always have programmers who don't want to learn anything new. It's interesting that there exists "Continuing Professional Development points" in the UK for healthcare: you get a rebate for each hour spent on courses to further your education. Maybe software engineering would benefit from this given the amount of, quite significant, cost sunk into large scale projects. Their universal credit programme should be incentive enough. Entirely different problem though. If not Go, then what?

andmarios 10y ago

So, do people who write timeseries databases in Go (like influxdb and prometheus), people who solve complex infrastructure problems (like k8s and docker), people who do distributed software (like consul) feel stupider because they write in Go?

kuschku 10y ago
A good engineer can build a bridge out of rotten trees. But they could still build a better bridge, in less time, with proper materials.
- cube2222 10y ago
  You know, I think, maybe it's not a coincidence that almost all high-scale infrastructure tooling is written in Go nowadays.
  - kuschku 10y ago
    Almost all high-scale infrastructure tooling? Are there many databases, parallelism frameworks, indexing systems, or machine learning frameworks in go? I’d be interested if you can name any fields where non-Google go projects dominate. I only know of containers.
    - cube2222 10y ago
      Service Discovery and configuration (Consul, etcd), Monitoring (Prometheus and Influx), non-container cluster management (Nomad), databases (CockroachDB), messaging (NATS, Jocko), Terraform. Other than that, I think everybody noticed the frequent posts "xxx database written in Go". Also, most high scale computing companies now use Go for their infrastructure parts. EDIT: You can also check out all the stuff the CoreOS team puts out.
      - kuschku 10y ago
        I’ve actually never used any of them, and none of the devs or ops people I usually talk to used them either. We never even heard of any of those except for CockroachDB. Are you sure these are "dominating the entire industry"-products, as you mentioned before? Or is it more that they’re only used in SV?
        cube2222 10y ago

cube2222 10y ago

Go has a lot of advantages. Yes, you are a little bit limmited sometimes because of the lack of generics and the like, but at the same time, if you learn to use Go interfaces well, you end up using them most of the time happily. The parallelism primitives are great too. As much as I love complex type systems, pattern matching, algebraic data types etc., I know that if Go had those things, it wouldn't be the language I love to write everyday anymore. Somehow, Go is a really practical language and you end up being very productive in it, at least from my experience. Saying that people who write Go should be stupid is shallow thinking. Complex languages aren't the only complexity that you should have. Some people concentrate on sophisticated architectural design (like Kubernetes). There is one thing in Go, that I haven't met anywhere else. I can really understand any codebase I stumble upon in a matter of seconds. This is a huge boon to productivity. Anyways, I never had any problems switching between Go and languages like F# or Scala on a daily basis. Rust looks interesting, though I think it will end up being too complex for a lot of people to understand, which will hinder its growth.

pka 10y ago
> There is one thing in Go, that I haven't met anywhere else. I can really understand any codebase I stumble upon in a matter of seconds. Care to elaborate a bit more? I understand that when you see for(...) { b[i] = f(a[i]); } then you instinctively know that it's a loop that maps over some sequence, and so on. But let's say you have a 50-100kloc codebase with a 100 files in it. In what unique to Go way does Go help you understand the big picture/coarse architecture of such a project?
- cube2222 10y ago
  Oh, that it doesn't. I meant smaller parts of code, and not for loops actually. (I prefer maps, filters etc.). Things like gofmt and the simplicity (in that, small number of concepts) of the language lead to most people writing fairly idiomatic code. This way most codebases look the same and you read each other's code as it were yours.
  - matwood 10y ago