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I live and love in Amsterdam and Golang seems to be the quintessential hipster language for this quintessentially hipster city. Booking.com's soup du jour if y

by socmag 10y ago

I live and love in Amsterdam and Golang seems to be the quintessential hipster language for this quintessentially hipster city. Booking.com's soup du jour if you will. Basically, if you aren't using JavaScript in a web shop, and you claim to be a "full-stack" "ninja", then probably you are using Go around here as a jobbing programmer. I know that sounds terribly cynical and obviously a massive generalization but that is my personal experience. I don't have a problem with Go per-se, but I do have a problem that a lot of people seem to go to extreme lengths to defend what someone else mentioned is frankly a pretty "mundane" language, citing memory safety, but more strangely portability and performance as its wonderful virtues. When I meet with the zealots of the Go community around here I often have to quickly excuse myself with good grace. Seriously, if that's what you want... go (pardon the pun) use C#, it is a saner and more expressive language, has a higher performance runtime and is way more portable with less vendor / career lock-in. Go... I just don't get it. Positives... Has a fairly nice package manager like npm. Isn't made by Microsoft if that's your thing. Oh and heaven forbid you don't have to think much... until you do because it is slow. For a project like Tor though, which is damn slow as it is, I think it is totally the wrong choice. Developers, please suck it up, get over it and learn C/C++ and some variation of Lisp. Fine, go play with different languages for fun stuff. Use python for ML, try serious meta-programming in D, or jump into Haskell for kicks. On the other hand modern C++ really can be a very safe language to work in if you can be bothered, and you are only deceiving yourself and your project going with something less sympathetic to the machine itself, especially if you are working on infrastructure level systems. Sorry if this offends anyone, and of course it is just one opinion, but I think I'm being fairly nice as compared to what Linus might have said in comparison. Basically stop it with the hobbyist shit. You are horrifying me and probably many others. You aren't writing a web page here, so please treat the project seriously. IMHO

FiloSottile 10y ago
You do realize they didn't pick Go, yes?
- socmag 10y ago
  Yes, but we got into a heated discussion about Go earlier in the thread. And it got my blood pressure up. :)
hamburglar 10y ago
> Developers, please suck it up, get over it and learn C/C++ and some variation of Lisp. I've got over 20 years of writing production C/C++ under my belt and I know Lisp. So I've "sucked it up." Am I allowed to like Go now? It never ceases to amaze me how many people are bothered about other people's taste in something so mundane. If you don't enjoy programming in Go, don't do it. I personally think it feels light and easy like a scripting language, but with more C-like performance. I like the fact that its stdlib is very complete, so I can sit down and do pretty much any kind of small project with zero external dependencies, I like the fact that the core libraries are well-designed so the interfaces are consistent and easy to learn, I like the fact that it produces statically-linked binaries so deployment issues are minimal, I like the simplicity of the CSP approach for a lot of concurrency problems. I could also come up with a list of things I don't like about Go, but I'm not going to bother, because I've decided that on the whole, I really like it as a tool. Btw: > Positives... Has a fairly nice package manager like npm One of my biggest complaints about golang is that it really doesn't have nice dependency management. It's terrible and probably the one issue that has made me seriously consider walking away. :)
- socmag 10y ago
  Sure, what you say is true but equally so or better for .Net or Java as well, plus they are generally faster and in the case of C# a better language imho. Why not them? You are right, the standard library is a pleasure to work with in Golang and for the most part I trust it, but hey anything you can do in that library is easily reproducible in more or less any other mainstream language. I really don't have an axe to grind with the language itself, it's a fun and productive thing to use for sure. My main problem is with people who spend most of their time writing customer service applications thinking that the same language they are ultra successful with in that space is suddenly appropriate for writing systems software, because, ughh "safety"? There is a heck of a lot more to safety than buffer overruns, and if you can't formalize abstractions for dealing with memory usage patterns, one might argue you have no business writing Tor in the first place. Hah well compared to C/C++ dependency management, Golang does pretty darn well!
  - geodel 10y ago
kodr 10y ago
Go doesn't really have a package manager (and that's a problem), it pulls the sources of the dependencies from github for example. There are multiple tools [1] to manage versioning, but Google only released recently (end of january) an official tool, still in beta. [1] https://github.com/golang/go/wiki/PackageManagementTools https://github.com/golang/go/wiki/PackageManagementTools

by socmag 10y ago

FiloSottile 10y ago

You do realize they didn't pick Go, yes?

socmag 10y ago
Yes, but we got into a heated discussion about Go earlier in the thread. And it got my blood pressure up. :)

hamburglar 10y ago

> Developers, please suck it up, get over it and learn C/C++ and some variation of Lisp. I've got over 20 years of writing production C/C++ under my belt and I know Lisp. So I've "sucked it up." Am I allowed to like Go now? It never ceases to amaze me how many people are bothered about other people's taste in something so mundane. If you don't enjoy programming in Go, don't do it. I personally think it feels light and easy like a scripting language, but with more C-like performance. I like the fact that its stdlib is very complete, so I can sit down and do pretty much any kind of small project with zero external dependencies, I like the fact that the core libraries are well-designed so the interfaces are consistent and easy to learn, I like the fact that it produces statically-linked binaries so deployment issues are minimal, I like the simplicity of the CSP approach for a lot of concurrency problems. I could also come up with a list of things I don't like about Go, but I'm not going to bother, because I've decided that on the whole, I really like it as a tool. Btw: > Positives... Has a fairly nice package manager like npm One of my biggest complaints about golang is that it really doesn't have nice dependency management. It's terrible and probably the one issue that has made me seriously consider walking away. :)

socmag 10y ago
Sure, what you say is true but equally so or better for .Net or Java as well, plus they are generally faster and in the case of C# a better language imho. Why not them? You are right, the standard library is a pleasure to work with in Golang and for the most part I trust it, but hey anything you can do in that library is easily reproducible in more or less any other mainstream language. I really don't have an axe to grind with the language itself, it's a fun and productive thing to use for sure. My main problem is with people who spend most of their time writing customer service applications thinking that the same language they are ultra successful with in that space is suddenly appropriate for writing systems software, because, ughh "safety"? There is a heck of a lot more to safety than buffer overruns, and if you can't formalize abstractions for dealing with memory usage patterns, one might argue you have no business writing Tor in the first place. Hah well compared to C/C++ dependency management, Golang does pretty darn well!
- geodel 10y ago

kodr 10y ago

Go doesn't really have a package manager (and that's a problem), it pulls the sources of the dependencies from github for example. There are multiple tools [1] to manage versioning, but Google only released recently (end of january) an official tool, still in beta. [1] https://github.com/golang/go/wiki/PackageManagementTools https://github.com/golang/go/wiki/PackageManagementTools