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I know a guy who used to teach Haskell at a university who now runs a development shop at a startup that uses Go. From I recall his main reason for choosing it

by gmoes 9y ago

I know a guy who used to teach Haskell at a university who now runs a development shop at a startup that uses Go. From I recall his main reason for choosing it was to hire cheaper less experienced developers. I remember talking to him about Go and he remarked something like: If you want to clean modular code don’t use Go. Not to disparage less experienced developers but I think teams of developers of any experience level need to have code governance and oversight regardless of the technologies and that a good team with good practices can create good code bases even with more complex and expressive languages. I know another colleague who did this with Scala and was able to properly mentor more junior developers by leading by example. I have not used Go. I have done and lot of Java and a bit of Scala and have many times leveraged generics to create a very high degree of reuse. Without them clearly you get a lot of boilerplate code which makes a codebase larger which leads to another type of complexity in my opinion. So the question is which scenario increases your codebase complexity and that probably boils down to what domain you are developing in. I explore some ideas relating to that tradeoff here [0]. Go has a specific use case that it targets which I believe is services and certain aspects of concurrency. Clearly the Go language and environment have value in the industry, however, as a language it offers little for people who want to have an opportunity grow and learn about more advanced concepts wrt to PLT and CS in general. I have a friend who is a Go fanatic and I try to encourage her to push her limits, but she feels and she can bang out service level code very quickly and she can as she is quite talented. Of course you can do that with Spring Boot as well. Regardless of your language you should always be trying to grow as a developer otherwise you risk becoming obsolete. To put it bluntly and I may get downvoted for this I feel Go is the “Rise of the Expert Beginner Language”. [1] [0] http://www.elegantcoding.com/2012/02/software-reuse-complexity-curve.html http://www.elegantcoding.com/2012/02/software-reuse-complexi... [1] https://www.daedtech.com/how-developers-stop-learning-rise-of-the-expert-beginner/ https://www.daedtech.com/how-developers-stop-learning-rise-o...

solidsnack9000 9y ago
"The Rise of the Expert Beginner" was a great read. I do see the parallels to the tone and tenor of some arguments in favor of Go. One thing I wonder about is a seeming complementary anti-pattern, the "Expert Only Language". Perhaps C++ is the only language that truly fits this description, but one can see shades of it in Haskell, Scala & Rust. To a limited degree, Bash and SQL exhibit similar qualities, because people can use them for years but barely know them. These are languages where a certain confusing richness is accepted as the cost of doing business, and where a long period of familiarization is assumed to be necessary before doing basic things.

by gmoes 9y ago

solidsnack9000 9y ago

"The Rise of the Expert Beginner" was a great read. I do see the parallels to the tone and tenor of some arguments in favor of Go. One thing I wonder about is a seeming complementary anti-pattern, the "Expert Only Language". Perhaps C++ is the only language that truly fits this description, but one can see shades of it in Haskell, Scala & Rust. To a limited degree, Bash and SQL exhibit similar qualities, because people can use them for years but barely know them. These are languages where a certain confusing richness is accepted as the cost of doing business, and where a long period of familiarization is assumed to be necessary before doing basic things.