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Is it just me or Golang started gaining momentum recently? More and more related articles/OSS projects/HN links show up every day.

terminalcommand 9y ago
I think Golang is very suitable for network programming tasks. It gives you wonderful libraries to work with sockets, strict rules to structure your code, automatic memory management, goroutines for concurrent programming etc. Most network related small apps were written in C, now you can write them in Go. With the added benefit of simple libraries, memory management and goroutines. You don't have to mess arround with platform specific sockets, threading libraries etc. Plus every piece of code you open is written in understandable Go. With C, there is years of baggage, multiple standards, pre-compiled headers, undefined behaviour etc. And lastly, new is always more exciting than old :)
lurker- 9y ago
When I first saw Go I was put off by its syntax, but after giving it a chance I very quickly fell in love with it. I've used C#, Python, Ruby, Java, C, Obj-C, JS and Go for mid-large scale projects. Go is the only language I've ever truly loved; sometimes I even feel like I'm writing poetry (as ridiculous as that may sound). The community is really incredible^, I've yet to encounter anything that didn't have great documentation or solved by packages. My favorite SO answer of any language is probably this one by icza: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/22892120/how-to-generate-a-random-string-of-a-fixed-length-in-golang https://stackoverflow.com/questions/22892120/how-to-generate... . I also feel that it's very easy to read and understand other peoples code compared to other languages (imo, the only aspect of Go that I think can be difficult for newcomers to grasp is pointers). All in all, I feel very confident that I'll still be writing Go code after ten years. ^ (Although I hate when certain "elitists" downvote questions because they feel they've been sufficiently answered elsewhere.. if a SO answer says how to display time to YYYY-MM-DD:HH-MM then don't complain if someone ask how to display time as YYYY-MM-DD.. I have a strong dislike towards jquery (or rather JS), but I think the great thing about jquery is that every imaginable edge-case seem to be documented)
- scaryclam 9y ago
  Genuine question as I've only dabbled in Go, but I've heard complaints from other dabblers that Go seems to encourage large files rather than breaking things up in a more modular fashion. Is that a reality? Or has the complainer just been unlucky in the code they've viewed?
  - insertnickname 9y ago
    I don't see any reason why Go would encourage large files. A Go package consists of every Go source file in a directory. You can use as many or as few files as you want per package.
    - scaryclam 9y ago
      Yeah, I found it a strange assertion to make, so was wondering if it held any water. Sometimes different languages have different ways of working, which seem odd to novices entering the space from a different background, so I didn't want to assume that they were wrong. Looks like it may be a case of coming across some less well written projects and making assumptions about the entire language, which is nice as Go seems fun :)
    - captncraig 9y ago
      We don't really have the "one class one file" beat into us like in java or c#. That means you gotta think a little to see how a package naturally splits up. Some people are better at that then others.
  - fmpwizard 9y ago
    I have been using Go for about 4 years at work and I would say they have been unlucky with the code they have looked at. You have the freedom to organize your code as you wish, you can easily go from one extreme to the other, one function per file to 1000 in one file. The only thing that isn't encouraged is to have very small packages, for example, if your project ends up split into 10 packages, but each of them is just one file (or one code file plus a test file), then most Go developers would suggest to group more files into a single package.
ikeyany 9y ago
No it's not you [0]. Rust, Go, R, and Python have the highest year-to-year growth. [0] https://stackoverflow.blog/2017/09/06/incredible-growth-python/ https://stackoverflow.blog/2017/09/06/incredible-growth-pyth...
- Cthulhu_ 9y ago
  Python is interesting in that list, given how it's at least 4 times as old as all of the other ones in that list. What's behind that? I don't recall any major developments after Python 3, and most of the news behind that one was about its backwards incompatibility (and currently how 2.x isn't about to go anytime soon)
  - pricechild 9y ago
    They followed up on that question with another blog post: https://stackoverflow.blog/2017/09/14/python-growing-quickly/ https://stackoverflow.blog/2017/09/14/python-growing-quickly...
  - rrdharan 9y ago
    Explosion of interest in machine learning and data science and decent Python-based tools for those fields.
  - goatlover 9y ago
    Python's huge popularity in scientific computing fields along with it being widely taught in schools. Notice also that R was on the list, which is obviously due to huge uptick in data science. R has been around for awhile as well.

terminalcommand 9y ago

I think Golang is very suitable for network programming tasks. It gives you wonderful libraries to work with sockets, strict rules to structure your code, automatic memory management, goroutines for concurrent programming etc. Most network related small apps were written in C, now you can write them in Go. With the added benefit of simple libraries, memory management and goroutines. You don't have to mess arround with platform specific sockets, threading libraries etc. Plus every piece of code you open is written in understandable Go. With C, there is years of baggage, multiple standards, pre-compiled headers, undefined behaviour etc. And lastly, new is always more exciting than old :)

lurker- 9y ago

When I first saw Go I was put off by its syntax, but after giving it a chance I very quickly fell in love with it. I've used C#, Python, Ruby, Java, C, Obj-C, JS and Go for mid-large scale projects. Go is the only language I've ever truly loved; sometimes I even feel like I'm writing poetry (as ridiculous as that may sound). The community is really incredible^, I've yet to encounter anything that didn't have great documentation or solved by packages. My favorite SO answer of any language is probably this one by icza: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/22892120/how-to-generate-a-random-string-of-a-fixed-length-in-golang https://stackoverflow.com/questions/22892120/how-to-generate... . I also feel that it's very easy to read and understand other peoples code compared to other languages (imo, the only aspect of Go that I think can be difficult for newcomers to grasp is pointers). All in all, I feel very confident that I'll still be writing Go code after ten years. ^ (Although I hate when certain "elitists" downvote questions because they feel they've been sufficiently answered elsewhere.. if a SO answer says how to display time to YYYY-MM-DD:HH-MM then don't complain if someone ask how to display time as YYYY-MM-DD.. I have a strong dislike towards jquery (or rather JS), but I think the great thing about jquery is that every imaginable edge-case seem to be documented)

scaryclam 9y ago
Genuine question as I've only dabbled in Go, but I've heard complaints from other dabblers that Go seems to encourage large files rather than breaking things up in a more modular fashion. Is that a reality? Or has the complainer just been unlucky in the code they've viewed?
- insertnickname 9y ago
  I don't see any reason why Go would encourage large files. A Go package consists of every Go source file in a directory. You can use as many or as few files as you want per package.
  - scaryclam 9y ago
    Yeah, I found it a strange assertion to make, so was wondering if it held any water. Sometimes different languages have different ways of working, which seem odd to novices entering the space from a different background, so I didn't want to assume that they were wrong. Looks like it may be a case of coming across some less well written projects and making assumptions about the entire language, which is nice as Go seems fun :)
  - captncraig 9y ago
    We don't really have the "one class one file" beat into us like in java or c#. That means you gotta think a little to see how a package naturally splits up. Some people are better at that then others.
- fmpwizard 9y ago
  I have been using Go for about 4 years at work and I would say they have been unlucky with the code they have looked at. You have the freedom to organize your code as you wish, you can easily go from one extreme to the other, one function per file to 1000 in one file. The only thing that isn't encouraged is to have very small packages, for example, if your project ends up split into 10 packages, but each of them is just one file (or one code file plus a test file), then most Go developers would suggest to group more files into a single package.

ikeyany 9y ago

No it's not you [0]. Rust, Go, R, and Python have the highest year-to-year growth. [0] https://stackoverflow.blog/2017/09/06/incredible-growth-python/ https://stackoverflow.blog/2017/09/06/incredible-growth-pyth...

Cthulhu_ 9y ago
Python is interesting in that list, given how it's at least 4 times as old as all of the other ones in that list. What's behind that? I don't recall any major developments after Python 3, and most of the news behind that one was about its backwards incompatibility (and currently how 2.x isn't about to go anytime soon)
- pricechild 9y ago
  They followed up on that question with another blog post: https://stackoverflow.blog/2017/09/14/python-growing-quickly/ https://stackoverflow.blog/2017/09/14/python-growing-quickly...
- rrdharan 9y ago
  Explosion of interest in machine learning and data science and decent Python-based tools for those fields.
- goatlover 9y ago
  Python's huge popularity in scientific computing fields along with it being widely taught in schools. Notice also that R was on the list, which is obviously due to huge uptick in data science. R has been around for awhile as well.