8 ms·

Both, really. Go's so small you can be quite proficient with in months. While it's not as productive as, say, Python (wrt how quickly you can get your code up a

Both, really. Go's so small you can be quite proficient with in months. While it's not as productive as, say, Python (wrt how quickly you can get your code up and running) it's much quicker than other languages (and nicer to use in the long run).

smegel 9y ago
> months ? Go is tiny. The tutorial takes an afternoon. A C programmer will be profecient within days.
- georgemcbay 9y ago
  I agree "months" seems too long, but "days" seems too short to me. Learning the keywords and basic Go syntax is simple, so in that sense days fits, but a C (or C++) programmer is probably also going to be writing unidiomatic Go code, falling back to unsafe too much, trying to recreate OOP with some kind of wonky self-rolled inheritance system, etc, for a few weeks before they really "get it".
- IshKebab 9y ago
  They may learn the language in days but not the standard library. That's always what takes the most time.
  - wvh 9y ago
    I agree. And may I add the ecosystem: which third party modules you should or shouldn't be looking at, and if you should rely on them or roll your own.
    - stouset 9y ago
      Then months for best practices, idioms, and understanding the pitfalls around concurrency and channels, which are nowhere near as "batteries-included" as people would lead you to believe. This "hype" around go letting you be productive sooner is honestly just bullshit. I've been programming for 20 years, with C, C++, Ruby, Perl, Scheme, Haskell, Rust, Go, Java, and others I've surely forgot. Sure, I was able to start writing go within a day. But it was terrible go, and months later I was still dealing with the consequences of early bad decisions. This isn't unique to go by any means. But if you go in thinking you're going to write a project that does some sort of non-trivial task and be able to rely on that later, you're going to have a bad time.
      - greenhouse_gas 9y ago
        But that's true with all those languages too. If you're an experienced Java programmer moving to Rust, you'll write Java in Rust. So it's 1 day of learning Go + 1 month of learning style vs 2 weeks of learning Rust + 1 month of learning style. [1] [1] Note, I think that Rust has the best community when it comes to getting beginners up to par, whether in #rust-beginners or on /r/rust. It just is a hard and not forgiving language.
        stouset 9y ago
        > But that's true with all those languages too. That is exactly my point, and I said as much in my post. > So it's 1 day of learning Go + 1 month of learning style vs 2 weeks of learning Rust + 1 month of learning style. More like 1 day vs. 1 week, with six months of ramp-up before you're writing anything approximating production-quality code. At which point, does it really matter that you were able to write garbage in one day rather than seven?
        logicallee 9y ago
        Hi. Could you (or anyone else here!) kindly answer this question: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14934690 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14934690 One way to get your correct answer is for me to propose a wrong or partial answer. How is this as a message to the past (i.e. I am guessing your answer to the above request): WRONG/FAKE ANSWER: "Note to past self: although you can write code that compiles on day 1 and day 2, before considering your code idiomatic and ready to build on top of (or even deploy to production), DO/LEARN THE FOLLOWING: 1) read and work through all of The Go Programming Language book. This teaches all idioms. 2) Practice and use Go's testing tools (built-in). Always use its reformat tool applied on every save from your IDE. 3) Begin using a better error and logging library than the built-in error passing idiom. Google this. 4) Use a debugger. Google this. 5) Security and versioning with go get is broken: Google this and learn vendoring with versions. Otherwise your code cannot go on production. 6) You control garbage collection frequency. Learn to set this. In emergencies disable it entirely to trade memory for latency to gain one or two milliseconds (approach hard realtime), for example when you are dropping requests. Then reenable when you can take the (very small) hit. Garbage collection is very efficient and low-latency. 7) Channels and concurrency (goroutines) do not work as described. Specifically: - This link will solve your problems with channels: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/41200505/whats-the-best-practice-to-synchronise-channels-and-wait-groups https://stackoverflow.com/questions/41200505/whats-the-best-... Adopt it. Then they work as described. For goroutines: Follow this document - https://gist.github.com/pzurek/6642797 https://gist.github.com/pzurek/6642797 After incorporating the above specific changes, you are ready to commit to production and build on top of what you want to build. " is the above message completely wrong and bullshit? Then please correct it. Your insight and experience are appreciated and I would love to read what you would write as a message to yourself in the past, to save those lost months. Thank you.
  - xfer 9y ago
    It will take a week at most, to figure out what libraries you will need, if you have programmed before in any language.
  - bborud 9y ago
    Yes, however, the concepts that are used to construct Go libraries are very simple. So it is still pretty quick and easy to learn Go.
- logicallee 9y ago
  >The tutorial takes an afternoon. A C programmer will be proficient within days. Hi! (I got a downvote but this is serious - I believe you!) Thanks for this useful information. Could I ask you (or anyone else) to write maybe a checklist of links/resources or steps a programmer could go through? Thank you again!
  - nindalf 9y ago
    Try out in order * tour.golang.org * gobyexample.com * The Go programming language book. (If you're a C programmer, one of the authors might be familiar to you) Personally I got hooked when I saw a talk by Andrew Gerrand where he created a working chat server in about 30 lines of code. I'd recommend this after gobyexample just to get a taste of what's possible - https://talks.golang.org/2012/chat.slide https://talks.golang.org/2012/chat.slide I hope you enjoy it :)
    - logicallee 9y ago
      Thank you. This is exactly what I was hoping for - thanks so much for your reply!
- azinman2 9y ago
  That doesn’t mean you’ll know idiomatic to (which isn’t the same as C), know the tooling, ecosystem, etc. It does take months to be proficient.
  - bborud 9y ago
    What do you base this on? Got some data to share?
    - wott 9y ago
      > What do you base this on? Experience? One does not get 'proficient' in a week in any given language. One can build up a program in a new language in a week, but that does not mean proficiency. It takes between many months and a few year to become proficient in a language: it is the outcome of a process of exploration, trials, mistakes, discoveries of better or more adapted ways, finding out the shortcomings an learning to work around them, picking a right balance between ease to write and ease to read, ease to write and performance...
      - JoeAltmaier 9y ago
        Proficient doesn't mean expert. It takes about 6 weeks to get proficient.
      - bborud 9y ago
        So, in other words, anecdotal evidence. So let's quantify what "proficient" means. How would you measure of someone is proficient in a programming language?
bborud 9y ago
I disagree slightly. The problem with Python is that it may be quick and easy to cobble together something that does what you want, but it is a pain in the ass for someone else to install and use. There is no shortcut where you can produce and distribute a binary so every damn user of your program will have to deal with Python versioning, installing dependencies etc. So for the user, Python is not productive. It is time-consuming and bothersome.
twic 9y ago
> While it's not as productive as, say, Python (wrt how quickly you can get your code up and running) it's much quicker than other languages (and nicer to use in the long run). I can see that an experienced Go developer would be more productive than an experienced C developer. But, based on my experience of writing Go, i can't see how they could be more productive an experienced developer in any other current mainstream(ish) language - by which i suppose i mean Python, Ruby, Java, Scala, Kotlin, and (modern) C++. Go's great strength is how fast it is to get up to speed with, not how productive it is once you are.
- notheguyouthink 9y ago
  I would argue that it has the potential to be more product than some dynamic languages. Not trying to start a pissing contest, to be clear. Some languages have a lot of mental overhead (JavaScript being an easy example), which I don't think matters how seasoned you are - I think it's pretty much a constant in that language. So even if you're a seasoned developer, I think it's very possible that there are other languages which are objectively more productive for seasoned developers. So, which languages Go is more productive than is not something I can say - but I think it's a quantifiable thing. There is a nice middle ground between rigid safety of something like Rust, and careless abandon of some extremely dynamic languages. Go has a nice middle ground, but whether it's the "perfect" spot I'm not sure. Hell, I'm not even willing to say it's objectively more productive than X languages. I will say that for me, personally, it's far more productive than JavaScript (Node) or Python. I can whack out more code in Python, faster, but any moderately sized project starts to run into maintenance overhead, and then suddenly I wish I was in a more rigid language. Middleground is good here, I think. Though, I will say that if a language like Python gets some nice typing tools like they're working on - especially behavior based typing like Go's interfaces, Rust's Traits, etc - I think that language could really shine for larger projects. Prototyping speed and maintainability is a big boon.
- barsonme 9y ago
  > i can't see how they could be more productive an experienced developer in any other current mainstream(ish) language Others mentioned overhead which is a big issue. Because Go is so simple the mental overhead of remembering how to do stuff, edge cases, etc. is much smaller than other languages. Sure, a Go dev and a Java dev can be just as productive in their respective languages. But as somebody who has to switch back and forth between Go, JS/TS, PHP, and Java Go is by far the easiest language to switch back to.
mbesto 9y ago
> wrt how quickly you can get your code up and running Why is this such a huge benefit for code that typically works at the system level? Wouldn't you value reliability, consistency, etc when adapting system level functions over speed to deployment?
- barsonme 9y ago
  When I wrote my comment I was thinking more about prototyping: after I sketch a design on paper or with UML diagrams I want to write a quick prototype. Go allows me to be able to quickly and easily sketch out a design with the added benefit that it's the language the actual application will be written in.

smegel 9y ago

> months ? Go is tiny. The tutorial takes an afternoon. A C programmer will be profecient within days.

georgemcbay 9y ago
I agree "months" seems too long, but "days" seems too short to me. Learning the keywords and basic Go syntax is simple, so in that sense days fits, but a C (or C++) programmer is probably also going to be writing unidiomatic Go code, falling back to unsafe too much, trying to recreate OOP with some kind of wonky self-rolled inheritance system, etc, for a few weeks before they really "get it".
IshKebab 9y ago
They may learn the language in days but not the standard library. That's always what takes the most time.
- wvh 9y ago
  I agree. And may I add the ecosystem: which third party modules you should or shouldn't be looking at, and if you should rely on them or roll your own.
  - stouset 9y ago
    Then months for best practices, idioms, and understanding the pitfalls around concurrency and channels, which are nowhere near as "batteries-included" as people would lead you to believe. This "hype" around go letting you be productive sooner is honestly just bullshit. I've been programming for 20 years, with C, C++, Ruby, Perl, Scheme, Haskell, Rust, Go, Java, and others I've surely forgot. Sure, I was able to start writing go within a day. But it was terrible go, and months later I was still dealing with the consequences of early bad decisions. This isn't unique to go by any means. But if you go in thinking you're going to write a project that does some sort of non-trivial task and be able to rely on that later, you're going to have a bad time.
    - greenhouse_gas 9y ago
      But that's true with all those languages too. If you're an experienced Java programmer moving to Rust, you'll write Java in Rust. So it's 1 day of learning Go + 1 month of learning style vs 2 weeks of learning Rust + 1 month of learning style. [1] [1] Note, I think that Rust has the best community when it comes to getting beginners up to par, whether in #rust-beginners or on /r/rust. It just is a hard and not forgiving language.
      - stouset 9y ago
        > But that's true with all those languages too. That is exactly my point, and I said as much in my post. > So it's 1 day of learning Go + 1 month of learning style vs 2 weeks of learning Rust + 1 month of learning style. More like 1 day vs. 1 week, with six months of ramp-up before you're writing anything approximating production-quality code. At which point, does it really matter that you were able to write garbage in one day rather than seven?
        logicallee 9y ago
        Hi. Could you (or anyone else here!) kindly answer this question: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14934690 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14934690 One way to get your correct answer is for me to propose a wrong or partial answer. How is this as a message to the past (i.e. I am guessing your answer to the above request): WRONG/FAKE ANSWER: "Note to past self: although you can write code that compiles on day 1 and day 2, before considering your code idiomatic and ready to build on top of (or even deploy to production), DO/LEARN THE FOLLOWING: 1) read and work through all of The Go Programming Language book. This teaches all idioms. 2) Practice and use Go's testing tools (built-in). Always use its reformat tool applied on every save from your IDE. 3) Begin using a better error and logging library than the built-in error passing idiom. Google this. 4) Use a debugger. Google this. 5) Security and versioning with go get is broken: Google this and learn vendoring with versions. Otherwise your code cannot go on production. 6) You control garbage collection frequency. Learn to set this. In emergencies disable it entirely to trade memory for latency to gain one or two milliseconds (approach hard realtime), for example when you are dropping requests. Then reenable when you can take the (very small) hit. Garbage collection is very efficient and low-latency. 7) Channels and concurrency (goroutines) do not work as described. Specifically: - This link will solve your problems with channels: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/41200505/whats-the-best-practice-to-synchronise-channels-and-wait-groups https://stackoverflow.com/questions/41200505/whats-the-best-... Adopt it. Then they work as described. For goroutines: Follow this document - https://gist.github.com/pzurek/6642797 https://gist.github.com/pzurek/6642797 After incorporating the above specific changes, you are ready to commit to production and build on top of what you want to build. " is the above message completely wrong and bullshit? Then please correct it. Your insight and experience are appreciated and I would love to read what you would write as a message to yourself in the past, to save those lost months. Thank you.
- xfer 9y ago
  It will take a week at most, to figure out what libraries you will need, if you have programmed before in any language.
- bborud 9y ago
  Yes, however, the concepts that are used to construct Go libraries are very simple. So it is still pretty quick and easy to learn Go.
logicallee 9y ago
>The tutorial takes an afternoon. A C programmer will be proficient within days. Hi! (I got a downvote but this is serious - I believe you!) Thanks for this useful information. Could I ask you (or anyone else) to write maybe a checklist of links/resources or steps a programmer could go through? Thank you again!
- nindalf 9y ago
  Try out in order * tour.golang.org * gobyexample.com * The Go programming language book. (If you're a C programmer, one of the authors might be familiar to you) Personally I got hooked when I saw a talk by Andrew Gerrand where he created a working chat server in about 30 lines of code. I'd recommend this after gobyexample just to get a taste of what's possible - https://talks.golang.org/2012/chat.slide https://talks.golang.org/2012/chat.slide I hope you enjoy it :)
  - logicallee 9y ago
    Thank you. This is exactly what I was hoping for - thanks so much for your reply!
azinman2 9y ago
That doesn’t mean you’ll know idiomatic to (which isn’t the same as C), know the tooling, ecosystem, etc. It does take months to be proficient.
- bborud 9y ago
  What do you base this on? Got some data to share?
  - wott 9y ago
    > What do you base this on? Experience? One does not get 'proficient' in a week in any given language. One can build up a program in a new language in a week, but that does not mean proficiency. It takes between many months and a few year to become proficient in a language: it is the outcome of a process of exploration, trials, mistakes, discoveries of better or more adapted ways, finding out the shortcomings an learning to work around them, picking a right balance between ease to write and ease to read, ease to write and performance...
    - JoeAltmaier 9y ago
      Proficient doesn't mean expert. It takes about 6 weeks to get proficient.
    - bborud 9y ago
      So, in other words, anecdotal evidence. So let's quantify what "proficient" means. How would you measure of someone is proficient in a programming language?

bborud 9y ago

I disagree slightly. The problem with Python is that it may be quick and easy to cobble together something that does what you want, but it is a pain in the ass for someone else to install and use. There is no shortcut where you can produce and distribute a binary so every damn user of your program will have to deal with Python versioning, installing dependencies etc. So for the user, Python is not productive. It is time-consuming and bothersome.

twic 9y ago

> While it's not as productive as, say, Python (wrt how quickly you can get your code up and running) it's much quicker than other languages (and nicer to use in the long run). I can see that an experienced Go developer would be more productive than an experienced C developer. But, based on my experience of writing Go, i can't see how they could be more productive an experienced developer in any other current mainstream(ish) language - by which i suppose i mean Python, Ruby, Java, Scala, Kotlin, and (modern) C++. Go's great strength is how fast it is to get up to speed with, not how productive it is once you are.

notheguyouthink 9y ago
I would argue that it has the potential to be more product than some dynamic languages. Not trying to start a pissing contest, to be clear. Some languages have a lot of mental overhead (JavaScript being an easy example), which I don't think matters how seasoned you are - I think it's pretty much a constant in that language. So even if you're a seasoned developer, I think it's very possible that there are other languages which are objectively more productive for seasoned developers. So, which languages Go is more productive than is not something I can say - but I think it's a quantifiable thing. There is a nice middle ground between rigid safety of something like Rust, and careless abandon of some extremely dynamic languages. Go has a nice middle ground, but whether it's the "perfect" spot I'm not sure. Hell, I'm not even willing to say it's objectively more productive than X languages. I will say that for me, personally, it's far more productive than JavaScript (Node) or Python. I can whack out more code in Python, faster, but any moderately sized project starts to run into maintenance overhead, and then suddenly I wish I was in a more rigid language. Middleground is good here, I think. Though, I will say that if a language like Python gets some nice typing tools like they're working on - especially behavior based typing like Go's interfaces, Rust's Traits, etc - I think that language could really shine for larger projects. Prototyping speed and maintainability is a big boon.
barsonme 9y ago
> i can't see how they could be more productive an experienced developer in any other current mainstream(ish) language Others mentioned overhead which is a big issue. Because Go is so simple the mental overhead of remembering how to do stuff, edge cases, etc. is much smaller than other languages. Sure, a Go dev and a Java dev can be just as productive in their respective languages. But as somebody who has to switch back and forth between Go, JS/TS, PHP, and Java Go is by far the easiest language to switch back to.

mbesto 9y ago

> wrt how quickly you can get your code up and running Why is this such a huge benefit for code that typically works at the system level? Wouldn't you value reliability, consistency, etc when adapting system level functions over speed to deployment?

barsonme 9y ago
When I wrote my comment I was thinking more about prototyping: after I sketch a design on paper or with UML diagrams I want to write a quick prototype. Go allows me to be able to quickly and easily sketch out a design with the added benefit that it's the language the actual application will be written in.