10 ms·

Hello Go

83 points by caspervonb 8y ago

nikivi 8y ago
I think Medium premium stories should be at least marked as such in the title. I also think it's quite absurd marking personal articles as 'pay to read'.
- caspervonb 8y ago
  You can delete or block Medium cookies to reset the "3 monthly freebies" counter.
- ccccccccccccc 8y ago
  I chuckle a bit thinking of someone paying a monthly subscription to read "Hello World" articles
  - caspervonb 8y ago
    But it's with bogo sort..! Anyhow the goal was to elicit a chuckle, so even if its not directly from the post I'll still count this as a success.
- coldtea 8y ago
  >I also think it's quite absurd marking personal articles as 'pay to read'. Well, it's not a news outlet. Most things on Medium is "personal articles". The whole idea is to have content authors get paid for their musings, rants, essays, etc.
  - sanderjd 8y ago
    The reason we pay news outlets for content is for their editorial function: curating writers, picking and choosing worthwhile topics, polishing the output, etc. This editorial function has no implicit value, but neither does the content; the value is in the combination of strong content with good editorial technique. My sense is that Medium isn't doing this, that they are instead just charging for content, which completely misses the point.
    - coldtea 8y ago
      >The reason we pay news outlets for content is for their editorial function: curating writers, picking and choosing worthwhile topics, polishing the output, etc. This editorial function has no implicit value, but neither does the content; the value is in the combination of strong content with good editorial technique. I don't think that's explicitly and consciously the case. Today that everybody can publish on the web, such curation might be especially needed, and payed for (to remove the noise). But back in the day, we paid news outlets because that was how we got articles -- whether they were curated or not was a secondary concern. People couldn't just buy paper and bare printing costs, handle distribution deals etc and distribute their own articles. So if we wanted articles we had to buy them in newspaper/magazine form. Curation came with that -- not as an inherent demand. >My sense is that Medium isn't doing this, that they are instead just charging for content, which completely misses the point. Not really. The whole point of internet distrubution, what was hailed as revolutionary, was the ability to 'skip the gatekeeper', publish directly to everybody, and grow your own audience. Medium is still kind of a middleman, but they're not a gatekeeper, in the sense that the editor in chief of an old news outlet was. Their whole point is giving people direct access to any content writer they like. If someone doesn't care for one, they can read others. No curation necessary, not only because you can discover yourself which authors you like, but also because Medium has infinite space for articles -- not the 100-200 pages of a newspaper/magazine. It's the same deal with independent musicians selling their wares directly.
      - sanderjd 8y ago
        I feel like you said lots of stuff that is true but isn't a response to my point. You said that back in the day we paid for news because of scarcity due to the costs of printing and distribution. That's true, but I'm not talking about back in the day, I'm talking about now. The value in the business model now is in the combination of strong content and editorial. You're saying that Medium is a middle-man but not a gatekeeper. That seems true to me, but what I'm saying is: that model doesn't make much sense. The majority of value provided by content middle-men is in doing gatekeeping well. I'm very interested in direct-to-audience models for creators. But it isn't clear to me that that's what Medium is doing... Maybe it is, but it's not how I think about it (yet), so maybe they need to talk that up more.
vijaybritto 8y ago
But coroutines are not threads right? Multiple coroutines can run on the same thread isnt it? I find it confusing when coroutines are interchanged between concurrency and parallelism.
- caspervonb 8y ago
  Concurrency does not equal parallelism. Lets say there's one core, or "hardware thread". Then the scheduler has no choice but to stick them all on the same thread. They are running concurrently but not in parallel. With more cores, Go can schedule them to run in parallel. Rob Pike has a great talk on YouTube titled something like "Concurrency is not parallelism" on this exact thing.
  - dpflan 8y ago
    Indeed, taken from "Go Proverbs" - https://go-proverbs.github.io/ https://go-proverbs.github.io/ "Concurrency is not parallelism." > Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PAAkCSZUG1c&t=3m42s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PAAkCSZUG1c&t=3m42s
- echlebek 8y ago
  The way all of this works is nicely detailed here: https://rakyll.org/scheduler/ https://rakyll.org/scheduler/
- Cthulhu_ 8y ago
  Yup, and in fact, Go will try its best to keep ownership of a single (hardware) thread, spinning no-ops on it to avoid a context switch in some situation. (or something to that effect)
fuckyouzilla 8y ago
What a bullshit article. Why is it here?
ktpsns 8y ago
> Note: If you are on Microsoft Windows without a UNIX like environment you might want to re-evaluate your life choices at this moment. Great sentence! However, Powershell got quite mature. `cat -n` is definetly something you will be able to do in Powershell with a similarly lengthy command.
- caspervonb 8y ago
  Haven't tried WSL yet but that's an option. Also most if not all of the GNU coreutils are available on Windows.
  - colek42 8y ago
    The file system performance was horrendous when I last used it for anything serious last fall.
    - cube2222 8y ago
      Which matters if you have 15k packages from npm to get (been there, done that) but doesn't matter at all when you're programming in Go.
      - colek42 8y ago
        Dep/Glide can get pretty slow.
    - panopticon 8y ago
      File system performance seems great for me, but I've only been seriously using WSL for the last 6 months or so. That being said, there are some major performance issues with how certain programs map memory and, as a result, things like Haskell are an absolute pain to use.
      - tome 8y ago
        I'm using Haskell right now. It's fine.
ngrilly 8y ago
Are we supposed to share articles behind paywalls on HN? Edit: I wasn't aware of the entry in HN's FAQ related to paywalls. See comments below.
- caspervonb 8y ago
  From the FAQ: > It's ok to post stories from sites with paywalls that have workarounds. > In comments, it's ok to ask how to read an article and to help other users do so. But please don't post complaints about paywalls. Those are off topic. For Medium, this means just blocking or deleting the cookie.
  - ngrilly 8y ago
    I know how to workaround the paywall by blocking or deleting the cookie :-) But I wasn't aware of this entry in HN's FAQ. I disagree, but if this is the rule on HN, then I'll follow it. Thanks for your reply.
jimktrains2 8y ago
Perhaps I've never hit the problems that go solves? I just don't understand why I'd learn it when it offers nothing new or unique and feels even more clunky to work in than alternatives. Specifically for me, I know enough poorly-typed lanagues that I want to be learning and using languages that offer me a good type system to express my program in, and not just jump through hoops to get things to work with no large benefit or reduction in code (and do when I get a chance). I get coroutines are cool, but they don't really seem to solve the problems I have with concurrency. They feel like baked-in message queues.
- systems 8y ago
  well, the ecosystem is usually the answer, Go is a simple language, which attracted many developers, which resulted in a large ecosystem but there is also the issue of complexity developer used Go to create complex systems, because it is a simple language, it allowed them to focus on the solution while, complex systems, might be simpler if they were built using complex languages, it seems most developer prefer to build complex systems using simple languages, rather than build simple systems using complex languages complexity doesn't disappear you can only spread it around, to make it more manageable .. using a simple language and moving complexity to the solution, seems like a trade off many are willing to make .. so this is not necessarily a bad thing .. its a preference if Go starts adding complex features, many developers will move or chose another language ..
  - systems 8y ago
    and today on xkcd https://xkcd.com/1987/ https://xkcd.com/1987/ Python is another example of a simple language + complex everything else or at least a language that started simple
  - parenthephobia 8y ago
    > it seems most developer prefer to build complex systems using simple languages, rather than build simple systems using complex languages According to TIOBE, 1% of programmers are using Go, whilst 23% are using Java or C++. If that is to be believed, developers do not appear to prefer simple languages. Or, Java and C++ are simple languages. Or, language selection is not based on preference.
jhoechtl 8y ago
Did I miss something or does this article end without coming to a conclusion? So let's do the authors work: What is the conclusion to be drawn here?
- caspervonb 8y ago
  That we should edit wikipedia and add "gopher sort" to bogo sort's list of names? Had planned more, each section getting more silly than the previous including a tangent where it evolved into Hello as a Service but for now, to be continued.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
AngeloAnolin 8y ago
Fastest way to get around the paywall on this article is by right clicking on the link and selecting: Chrome: Open Link in Incognito Window FF: Open Link in New Private Window These are the browsers I used generally.
millstone 8y ago
That rand.Shuffle interface looks pretty nice; why wasn't that used for sort?
- caspervonb 8y ago
  rand.Shuffle was introduced in 1.10 which is currently the tip, maybe it's a case of lessons learned?
- skj 8y ago
  Because instead of one special function (swap) it needs two (swap and compare), and the two refer to the same data. So, put that data in a struct and give it methods.
shekhar101 8y ago
Slightly OT, but I really want to learn golang but the amount of available resources[0] makes it quite overwhelming. I don't want to learn simple stuff but also want to go along the basics and learn good coding practice and design patterns. Any recommendations? What's your favorite resource for learning golang that helped you the most? [0]: https://github.com/golang/go/wiki/Learn https://github.com/golang/go/wiki/Learn
- DisownedWheat 8y ago
  Honestly the Tour of Go on their site is pretty good for just diving into it. You can probably just skim the first few chapters just to get familiar with the syntax. https://tour.golang.org/welcome/1 https://tour.golang.org/welcome/1

83 points by caspervonb 8y ago

I think Medium premium stories should be at least marked as such in the title. I also think it's quite absurd marking personal articles as 'pay to read'.

caspervonb 8y ago
You can delete or block Medium cookies to reset the "3 monthly freebies" counter.
ccccccccccccc 8y ago
I chuckle a bit thinking of someone paying a monthly subscription to read "Hello World" articles
- caspervonb 8y ago
  But it's with bogo sort..! Anyhow the goal was to elicit a chuckle, so even if its not directly from the post I'll still count this as a success.
coldtea 8y ago
>I also think it's quite absurd marking personal articles as 'pay to read'. Well, it's not a news outlet. Most things on Medium is "personal articles". The whole idea is to have content authors get paid for their musings, rants, essays, etc.
- sanderjd 8y ago
  The reason we pay news outlets for content is for their editorial function: curating writers, picking and choosing worthwhile topics, polishing the output, etc. This editorial function has no implicit value, but neither does the content; the value is in the combination of strong content with good editorial technique. My sense is that Medium isn't doing this, that they are instead just charging for content, which completely misses the point.
  - coldtea 8y ago
    >The reason we pay news outlets for content is for their editorial function: curating writers, picking and choosing worthwhile topics, polishing the output, etc. This editorial function has no implicit value, but neither does the content; the value is in the combination of strong content with good editorial technique. I don't think that's explicitly and consciously the case. Today that everybody can publish on the web, such curation might be especially needed, and payed for (to remove the noise). But back in the day, we paid news outlets because that was how we got articles -- whether they were curated or not was a secondary concern. People couldn't just buy paper and bare printing costs, handle distribution deals etc and distribute their own articles. So if we wanted articles we had to buy them in newspaper/magazine form. Curation came with that -- not as an inherent demand. >My sense is that Medium isn't doing this, that they are instead just charging for content, which completely misses the point. Not really. The whole point of internet distrubution, what was hailed as revolutionary, was the ability to 'skip the gatekeeper', publish directly to everybody, and grow your own audience. Medium is still kind of a middleman, but they're not a gatekeeper, in the sense that the editor in chief of an old news outlet was. Their whole point is giving people direct access to any content writer they like. If someone doesn't care for one, they can read others. No curation necessary, not only because you can discover yourself which authors you like, but also because Medium has infinite space for articles -- not the 100-200 pages of a newspaper/magazine. It's the same deal with independent musicians selling their wares directly.
    - sanderjd 8y ago
      I feel like you said lots of stuff that is true but isn't a response to my point. You said that back in the day we paid for news because of scarcity due to the costs of printing and distribution. That's true, but I'm not talking about back in the day, I'm talking about now. The value in the business model now is in the combination of strong content and editorial. You're saying that Medium is a middle-man but not a gatekeeper. That seems true to me, but what I'm saying is: that model doesn't make much sense. The majority of value provided by content middle-men is in doing gatekeeping well. I'm very interested in direct-to-audience models for creators. But it isn't clear to me that that's what Medium is doing... Maybe it is, but it's not how I think about it (yet), so maybe they need to talk that up more.

vijaybritto 8y ago

But coroutines are not threads right? Multiple coroutines can run on the same thread isnt it? I find it confusing when coroutines are interchanged between concurrency and parallelism.

caspervonb 8y ago
Concurrency does not equal parallelism. Lets say there's one core, or "hardware thread". Then the scheduler has no choice but to stick them all on the same thread. They are running concurrently but not in parallel. With more cores, Go can schedule them to run in parallel. Rob Pike has a great talk on YouTube titled something like "Concurrency is not parallelism" on this exact thing.
- dpflan 8y ago
  Indeed, taken from "Go Proverbs" - https://go-proverbs.github.io/ https://go-proverbs.github.io/ "Concurrency is not parallelism." > Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PAAkCSZUG1c&t=3m42s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PAAkCSZUG1c&t=3m42s
echlebek 8y ago
The way all of this works is nicely detailed here: https://rakyll.org/scheduler/ https://rakyll.org/scheduler/
Cthulhu_ 8y ago
Yup, and in fact, Go will try its best to keep ownership of a single (hardware) thread, spinning no-ops on it to avoid a context switch in some situation. (or something to that effect)

fuckyouzilla 8y ago

What a bullshit article. Why is it here?

ktpsns 8y ago

> Note: If you are on Microsoft Windows without a UNIX like environment you might want to re-evaluate your life choices at this moment. Great sentence! However, Powershell got quite mature. `cat -n` is definetly something you will be able to do in Powershell with a similarly lengthy command.

caspervonb 8y ago
Haven't tried WSL yet but that's an option. Also most if not all of the GNU coreutils are available on Windows.
- colek42 8y ago
  The file system performance was horrendous when I last used it for anything serious last fall.
  - cube2222 8y ago
    Which matters if you have 15k packages from npm to get (been there, done that) but doesn't matter at all when you're programming in Go.
    - colek42 8y ago
      Dep/Glide can get pretty slow.
  - panopticon 8y ago
    File system performance seems great for me, but I've only been seriously using WSL for the last 6 months or so. That being said, there are some major performance issues with how certain programs map memory and, as a result, things like Haskell are an absolute pain to use.
    - tome 8y ago
      I'm using Haskell right now. It's fine.

ngrilly 8y ago

Are we supposed to share articles behind paywalls on HN? Edit: I wasn't aware of the entry in HN's FAQ related to paywalls. See comments below.

caspervonb 8y ago
From the FAQ: > It's ok to post stories from sites with paywalls that have workarounds. > In comments, it's ok to ask how to read an article and to help other users do so. But please don't post complaints about paywalls. Those are off topic. For Medium, this means just blocking or deleting the cookie.
- ngrilly 8y ago
  I know how to workaround the paywall by blocking or deleting the cookie :-) But I wasn't aware of this entry in HN's FAQ. I disagree, but if this is the rule on HN, then I'll follow it. Thanks for your reply.

jimktrains2 8y ago

Perhaps I've never hit the problems that go solves? I just don't understand why I'd learn it when it offers nothing new or unique and feels even more clunky to work in than alternatives. Specifically for me, I know enough poorly-typed lanagues that I want to be learning and using languages that offer me a good type system to express my program in, and not just jump through hoops to get things to work with no large benefit or reduction in code (and do when I get a chance). I get coroutines are cool, but they don't really seem to solve the problems I have with concurrency. They feel like baked-in message queues.

systems 8y ago
well, the ecosystem is usually the answer, Go is a simple language, which attracted many developers, which resulted in a large ecosystem but there is also the issue of complexity developer used Go to create complex systems, because it is a simple language, it allowed them to focus on the solution while, complex systems, might be simpler if they were built using complex languages, it seems most developer prefer to build complex systems using simple languages, rather than build simple systems using complex languages complexity doesn't disappear you can only spread it around, to make it more manageable .. using a simple language and moving complexity to the solution, seems like a trade off many are willing to make .. so this is not necessarily a bad thing .. its a preference if Go starts adding complex features, many developers will move or chose another language ..
- systems 8y ago
  and today on xkcd https://xkcd.com/1987/ https://xkcd.com/1987/ Python is another example of a simple language + complex everything else or at least a language that started simple
- parenthephobia 8y ago
  > it seems most developer prefer to build complex systems using simple languages, rather than build simple systems using complex languages According to TIOBE, 1% of programmers are using Go, whilst 23% are using Java or C++. If that is to be believed, developers do not appear to prefer simple languages. Or, Java and C++ are simple languages. Or, language selection is not based on preference.

jhoechtl 8y ago

Did I miss something or does this article end without coming to a conclusion? So let's do the authors work: What is the conclusion to be drawn here?

caspervonb 8y ago
That we should edit wikipedia and add "gopher sort" to bogo sort's list of names? Had planned more, each section getting more silly than the previous including a tangent where it evolved into Hello as a Service but for now, to be continued.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

AngeloAnolin 8y ago

Fastest way to get around the paywall on this article is by right clicking on the link and selecting: Chrome: Open Link in Incognito Window FF: Open Link in New Private Window These are the browsers I used generally.

millstone 8y ago

That rand.Shuffle interface looks pretty nice; why wasn't that used for sort?

caspervonb 8y ago
rand.Shuffle was introduced in 1.10 which is currently the tip, maybe it's a case of lessons learned?
skj 8y ago
Because instead of one special function (swap) it needs two (swap and compare), and the two refer to the same data. So, put that data in a struct and give it methods.

shekhar101 8y ago

Slightly OT, but I really want to learn golang but the amount of available resources[0] makes it quite overwhelming. I don't want to learn simple stuff but also want to go along the basics and learn good coding practice and design patterns. Any recommendations? What's your favorite resource for learning golang that helped you the most? [0]: https://github.com/golang/go/wiki/Learn https://github.com/golang/go/wiki/Learn

DisownedWheat 8y ago
Honestly the Tour of Go on their site is pretty good for just diving into it. You can probably just skim the first few chapters just to get familiar with the syntax. https://tour.golang.org/welcome/1 https://tour.golang.org/welcome/1