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It's a real shame that the programming industry has bought into the Go hype so readily. Don't get me wrong: the design decisions made by the Go team make lots o
by kerkeslager 9y ago
It's a real shame that the programming industry has bought into the Go hype so readily. Don't get me wrong: the design decisions made by the Go team make lots of sense within the context of Google. But the vast majority of programmers don't have Google's problems of scale, and by using Go they give up many benefits of modern type-safe programming languages. There's a method to Google's madness, but for most development teams, adopting Go is imitating the madness without understanding the method.
Of course, this is extremely beneficial to Google: they get a community of people developing free libraries for them. But for the rest of us, it's an enormous drain of mindshare that could be devoted to more general-purpose languages.
- curioustom 9y agoHonest request - could you list the top benefits of modern languages people are giving up in favor of Go ?
- kerkeslager 9y agoType checking, mainly. Lack of generics makes the type system fairly useless. Go generate works around the code duplication caused by no generics, but exacerbates the debugging problems. This is a tradeoff, increasing bugs and debugging time in exchange for faster compilation. I believe the developers when they say this makes sense in a 1 billion line codebase like Google's, but I've worked on 1 million line codebases and at that size debug time vastly outweighs compilation time in i.e. C#. I'm actually in a good passion to evaluate this because I worked in both C# and Java with and without Generics. Most codebases are far fewer than 1 million lines. There were other big problems with Go last time I checked, but I haven't looked at it much in a while, so I won't venture to say more since those things might have changed.
- Arzh 9y agoGenerating the code leads to a lot easier debugging for me. In C++ debugging generics are annoying to put breakpoints in, since it is harder to hit the exact implementation I want (VS has a way to do this but it is a little annoying to get right). I don't mind doing that because all too often I've seen a 'generic' implementation gain more and more flags to make it less and less generic. I've only ever needed to do that a few times, the built in containers cover 95% of what I need. I came to go because I was formulating an opinion of c++, java, javascript etc and they aligned very closely to what the main team of three guys were talking about when they were first releasing it. Most of the time I never scale the application but I still love the way to solve problems in go, especially when I'm doing something in a concurrent manner. I've also had a large (5M+ lines) C++ project that would need to be complied 3-4 times to do things like CI and automated testing. So each build taking 1-1.5 hours, which is not crazy, because of rebuilding code that is static 99% of the time mean that it is worth it to me.
- kerkeslager 9y agoIt's 2017. C++ was invented in 1984. Just because a 33-year old language has problems doesn't mean Go is the best solution.
- Arzh 9y agoI find that go is the best solution for my problems
- rbehrends 9y agoC++ templates are a very idiosyncratic way of doing parametric polymorphism, and the C/C++ compilation model is even more idiosyncratic. You cannot make general statements about parametric polymorphism based on that.
- Arzh 9y agoEverything I said was based on my experience with C++, I was making pointed statements not general ones.
- yazr 9y agoCan you please comment on this code base ? Which tools / build chain r u using ? Did the actual compile take 1hr or the full CI/test ? Did u try use any parallelization ? I am curious because i am working on a "smart" parallelizer builder
- Arzh 9y agoYeah each build would take about an hour, 4-5 hours for the whole CI/test to get finished. It was crossed complied so there was an MSBuild and a gcc build. It was sone in serial since we didn't want to waste time building the release if the testing or QA builds failed.
- flashmob 9y agoType system is pretty cool in go. Particularly how the interfaces work, you don't have to explicitly declare that your object /type implements an interface, it automatically figures it out. Lack of genetics makes the code easier to read. Much better with interfaces. Check this out http://blog.jonathanoliver.com/golang-has-generics/ http://blog.jonathanoliver.com/golang-has-generics/
- rbehrends 9y ago> Check this out http://blog.jonathanoliver.com/golang-has-generics/ http://blog.jonathanoliver.com/golang-has-generics/ The author makes the common mistake of assuming that subtype polymorphism can be a full replacement for parametric polymorphism. It isn't, and neither is parametric polymorphism a replacement for subtype polymorphism.
- kerkeslager 9y agoDuck typing is admittedly nice. The article you linked is deeply confused. He complains about a complicated generic type that he never encountered, and it's not clear if he's even used generics at all. He also says that if he needs to reuse something later he'll just implement an interface (huh?).
- Silhouette 9y agoCheck this out http://blog.jonathanoliver.com/golang-has-generics/ http://blog.jonathanoliver.com/golang-has-generics/ I'm afraid that's not a well-informed article. The assumption that the main use case for generics is collections is very limiting, for example. That might have been one of the original motivations, but today generic types are widely used for countless data structures and algorithms, and even modelling entire patterns of computation in languages like Haskell. They let you prove a lot more useful properties than just not inadvertently trying to pull a foo out of a set of bars.
- puobelle 9y agohttps://www.reddit.com/r/programmingcirclejerk/comments/6m7gpg/type_system_is_pretty_cool_in_go_particularly_how/ https://www.reddit.com/r/programmingcirclejerk/comments/6m7g...
- di4na 9y agoMemory isolation. Goroutines are really a poor man Actor. Error handling and control of the flow. Functions as first class citizens with real closure. Dynamic tracing. Etc etc
- curioustom 9y agoThanks! Is there a language which mostly has those but also has some of the benefits of Go?
- di4na 9y agoErlang and Elixir and all languages on the BEAM. Haskell, Ocaml and Rust on recent linux kernel or on freeBSD/Illumos OS. But i do know what are the advantage of Go you want because i personally do not see a lot in it. Different pov i guess.
- ice109 9y agoumm I chose go exactly because it has a type system. what's another "modern" type safe language that's as convenient as go? kotlin? c#?
- boubiyeah 9y agoAlso: Scala, TypeScript, F#
- 43224gg252 9y agoI've only used Scala and TypeScript. TypeScript is crap compared to Go. It's yet another abstraction layer on top of javascript and it's much slower and even more difficult to program with than Go. There's no point in using TS when Go is there. Scala is yet another language running on a JVM and its syntax is almost as bad and clumsy as Java. Most benchmarks put it on par with Go in terms of performance. I just don't see a point in using these languages when Go is just as capable, more simple, compiled to binaries (and can even run on bare metal in some cases), runs on more platforms, has much better editor support, and is just more fun to use in general.
- Others 9y agoScala has its problems, but it is not anywhere near as clumsy as Java. Where Scala falls flat is implicitness, an overabundance of features, and extreamly dense syntax for very high levels of abstraction. Its syntax is actually quite nice, with relatively few warts. I find it a joy to write, and very fluid.
- c_shu 9y agoScala is too complicated. It reminds me of C++. But C++ is fast. People use it probably when performance is their first priority. For practical reasons I just bear with C++. Use it as necessary. I would rather not bear with another complicated language, unless there are compelling reasons. I think it's unlikely that Scala can be useful to me in the near future, because there are so many good alternatives.
- hu3 9y agoYou really think Google's scale actually benefits significantly from comunity libraries? At that scale it must be a nitghmare to use third party code. Hell they even invented their own system programming language.
- kerkeslager 9y agoOf course. They don't have to import a library as a package, as most are BSD they can just use the code. And even if they use dependencies, dependency management can be simplified by only importing mature, conservative libraries. Most problems developers have with dependencies are caused by importing every 0.x versioned library in i.e. NPM and plugging together a bunch of buggy leaky abstractions.
- rbehrends 9y agoA major reason, in my opinion, is that Go addressed an actual need. And that is providing an imperative, GCed language with native compilation. We've seen some more languages that cover this particular niche in recent years, but they aren't yet mature and/or lack backing. The biggest problem here is garbage collection. Garbage collection (or other forms of automatic memory management) has traditionally been necessary for functional languages and (as a matter of practicality) popular for interpreters and JIT-compiled languages, but has often encountered hostility and rejection among users of imperative, natively compiled languages. Go was simply one of the first languages to hit that niche and reach a sufficient level of maturity. Putting up with Go's idiosyncrasies then became simply a tradeoff.
- kerkeslager 9y agoD was fairly mature before Go was invented, so I'd credit Go's success to Google hype rather than the reasons you mentioned.
- rbehrends 9y agoSorry, D's garbage collector is too limited to qualify. It is a stop-the-world, conservative collector with a history of performance problems [1]. And the fact that D development appears to be focusing on @nogc rather than fixing the GC issues also doesn't help. [1] Such as https://pointersgonewild.com/2014/09/09/ds-garbage-collector-problem/ https://pointersgonewild.com/2014/09/09/ds-garbage-collector...
- bostand 9y agoMalware creators have switched to golang because it makes it very easy to write platform independent networked code. You are fighting a lost battle, go has already won
- lostmsu 9y agoAFAIK last week's Petya is in C#.
- crdoconnor 9y agoI don't think they necessarily have. TIOBE is just a crappy index. PYPL is better: https://pypl.github.io/PYPL.html https://pypl.github.io/PYPL.html
- notacoward 9y agoI'm not sure that an index based on availability of tutorials is really an improvement. It's explicitly targeting a subset of the whole programming population.
- crdoconnor 9y agoIt's based upon volume of searches for tutorials, not availability. It's a leading indicator rather than an overall measure of popularity.
- notacoward 9y ago"Availability of tutorials" vs. "searches for tutorials" doesn't affect the point. It's still selecting a subset of programmers. While it's somewhat useful as a leading indicator of popularity over the next couple of years, it's less so w.r.t. either the present or the further future. I'm not saying it has no value at all, but it's not clearly a substitute - let alone a superior substitute - for surveys that measure other things.
- randomdata 9y agoThe problem with all those modern type-safe programming languages is that they all use modern programming idioms. In reality, the market just wanted another C, the 2nd place language in this list, without the parts that make it especially dangerous to use. Go came the most close to providing that, and thus it started to see adoption in that market.