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I would argue that it's simplicity. I believe I've read somewhere that Golang was designed with junior engineers in mind. They wanted to create a language that

I would argue that it's simplicity. I believe I've read somewhere that Golang was designed with junior engineers in mind. They wanted to create a language that young engineers could learn easily yet cannot make a lot of mess due to its simplicity. They baked all features necessary right into the language. You get a http server, ssl support, templating engine etc. right in the language. You also have a database agnostic database driver right in the language. Python is also similar in many ways, it comes with "batteries included". But in my experience go standard library is written in a crystal clear straight-forward way. My workflow (and I believe the workflows of many programs) always involves jumping to the source of go standard library and just reading the code. Django on the other hand has layers and layers of magic, you've got an ORM, modules etc. etc. Some people might like to let a framework handle everything, learn it inside and out and use it. But for other people like me, with a short attention span, django seems subjectively boring. Maybe if I didn't program as a hobby and it was my job to learn django I might have taken the time and learn it. I started the django tutorial twice in the last 2-3 years. Both the times, I got bored and left. My subjective opinion was that it didn't teach me anything besides how to "generate" a site with Django. OTOH I had much more luck with Flask. Immediately after following the tutorial I was able to write websites and deploy them. I think it's a matter of taste. I don't like big frameworks, I like to keep things very simple and minimal. My favorite OS of choice is OpenBSD, my favorite languages are C, Golang and Python. I don't like to use IDEs, I use Emacs, even Emacs feels a bit bloated sometimes. From time to time I get the urge to try one of the big frameworks like Rails and Django, but I never quite got them.

Karunamon 8y ago
I ran into this problem hard while learning Rails, and a full 99.9% of tutorials out there have you using generators rather than learning how it works. As a result, I didn't learn Rails for ages, writing it off as magic beyond my ken since none of them were teaching me what I thought I needed to know. The tipping point for me was actually progressing through these tutorials a few times. In Ralis land, creating a new page results in no less than 3 files being touched. A new view and controller, and a modification to routes.rb so the page can be hit. If those pages need to interact with the database, you also need to create a model and likely a database migration to write your new tables. Once you get comfortable with the ecosystem, you stop seeing the generators as newbie crutches and start seeing them as serious time savers. It's like you're learning a Rake-based metalanguage that spits out Ruby and ERB code. It's much less time consuming to just delete any extra boilerplate than to make all those changes by hand. That said, if you dig simplicity, then things like Django and Rails (especially Rails) will be huge turnoffs. The magic is their selling point :)
- terminalcommand 8y ago
  That is exactly what I felt. Even while using Flask I was put off by having to rely on magical decorators @app.route() etc. While I was experimenting with ruby I had really enjoyed toying around with the cgi module. Nowadays I want to dig a little deeper into uwsgi with Python. Maybe at the end of my journey, I will reach enlightenment and get to the point where I start seeing the generators as serious time savers. For now I feel like, if I want a generator, I'll build one :).
sbov 8y ago
> They baked all features necessary right into the language. Not really. What about sessions? Auth? CSRF protection?
- terminalcommand 8y ago
  That's true Golang does not come with automatic session management, authentication, csrf etc. But if you look at it, csrf is just a hidden form value involving a token injected into the page. It is not hard to implement. In that sense Flask doesn't have csrf proection either. Session management on the other hand could be troubling, but in the end they all rely on cookies: if I take a look at https://golang.org/src/net/http/cookie.go https://golang.org/src/net/http/cookie.go , I can easily make sense of it. But I can imagine the need for a higher level library for session management. There is something called gorilla toolkit which has session management, but you're right it isn't included in the standard library. Golang's own template engine is also very primitive.
michaelcampbell 8y ago
> I believe I've read somewhere that Golang was designed with junior engineers in mind. Interesting, when one of the complaints about Java is exactly this.
- terminalcommand 8y ago
  I found the link again, apparently Rob Pike had said: The key point here is our programmers are Googlers, they’re not researchers. They’re typically, fairly young, fresh out of school, probably learned Java, maybe learned C or C++, probably learned Python. They’re not capable of understanding a brilliant language but we want to use them to build good software. So, the language that we give them has to be easy for them to understand and easy to adopt. [1] But I think we should also keep Rob Pike's experience and wits in mind. It was probably intended as a humble witty remark. If you consider how complex concurrency is, and how Golang has made it simple with a single keyword to spawn coroutines (go) and a straightforward data structure (channels), I think he is right to say that Golang is easy to understand and easy to adopt. [1] http://nomad.uk.net/articles/why-gos-design-is-a-disservice-to-intelligent-programmers.html http://nomad.uk.net/articles/why-gos-design-is-a-disservice-... citing the quote from http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/Lang-NEXT/Lang-NEXT-2014/From-Parallel-to-Concurrent http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/Lang-NEXT/Lang-NEXT-2014/Fro...

Karunamon 8y ago

I ran into this problem hard while learning Rails, and a full 99.9% of tutorials out there have you using generators rather than learning how it works. As a result, I didn't learn Rails for ages, writing it off as magic beyond my ken since none of them were teaching me what I thought I needed to know. The tipping point for me was actually progressing through these tutorials a few times. In Ralis land, creating a new page results in no less than 3 files being touched. A new view and controller, and a modification to routes.rb so the page can be hit. If those pages need to interact with the database, you also need to create a model and likely a database migration to write your new tables. Once you get comfortable with the ecosystem, you stop seeing the generators as newbie crutches and start seeing them as serious time savers. It's like you're learning a Rake-based metalanguage that spits out Ruby and ERB code. It's much less time consuming to just delete any extra boilerplate than to make all those changes by hand. That said, if you dig simplicity, then things like Django and Rails (especially Rails) will be huge turnoffs. The magic is their selling point :)

terminalcommand 8y ago
That is exactly what I felt. Even while using Flask I was put off by having to rely on magical decorators @app.route() etc. While I was experimenting with ruby I had really enjoyed toying around with the cgi module. Nowadays I want to dig a little deeper into uwsgi with Python. Maybe at the end of my journey, I will reach enlightenment and get to the point where I start seeing the generators as serious time savers. For now I feel like, if I want a generator, I'll build one :).

sbov 8y ago

> They baked all features necessary right into the language. Not really. What about sessions? Auth? CSRF protection?

terminalcommand 8y ago
That's true Golang does not come with automatic session management, authentication, csrf etc. But if you look at it, csrf is just a hidden form value involving a token injected into the page. It is not hard to implement. In that sense Flask doesn't have csrf proection either. Session management on the other hand could be troubling, but in the end they all rely on cookies: if I take a look at https://golang.org/src/net/http/cookie.go https://golang.org/src/net/http/cookie.go , I can easily make sense of it. But I can imagine the need for a higher level library for session management. There is something called gorilla toolkit which has session management, but you're right it isn't included in the standard library. Golang's own template engine is also very primitive.

michaelcampbell 8y ago

> I believe I've read somewhere that Golang was designed with junior engineers in mind. Interesting, when one of the complaints about Java is exactly this.

terminalcommand 8y ago
I found the link again, apparently Rob Pike had said: The key point here is our programmers are Googlers, they’re not researchers. They’re typically, fairly young, fresh out of school, probably learned Java, maybe learned C or C++, probably learned Python. They’re not capable of understanding a brilliant language but we want to use them to build good software. So, the language that we give them has to be easy for them to understand and easy to adopt. [1] But I think we should also keep Rob Pike's experience and wits in mind. It was probably intended as a humble witty remark. If you consider how complex concurrency is, and how Golang has made it simple with a single keyword to spawn coroutines (go) and a straightforward data structure (channels), I think he is right to say that Golang is easy to understand and easy to adopt. [1] http://nomad.uk.net/articles/why-gos-design-is-a-disservice-to-intelligent-programmers.html http://nomad.uk.net/articles/why-gos-design-is-a-disservice-... citing the quote from http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/Lang-NEXT/Lang-NEXT-2014/From-Parallel-to-Concurrent http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/Lang-NEXT/Lang-NEXT-2014/Fro...