4 ms·

Go seems to be optimized for onboarding new developers (particularly straight out of school) quickly, rather than for the long term comfort of developers using

Go seems to be optimized for onboarding new developers (particularly straight out of school) quickly, rather than for the long term comfort of developers using it. There are Rob Pike quotes that speak to the first part of that at least. If I was a business owner, I'd love Go. But what I can't really figure out is why so many devs love it. It's far from the worst thing in the world, I don't hate it, but I just can't get excited over it either.

adtac 7y ago
Defers, channels, inexpensive goroutines, a mostly consistent standard library, very good performance, garbage collection, being similar to C, strongly typed, and readability are the reasons why I've enjoyed writing Go exclusively for the past couple of years. Almost none of these is exclusive to Go, but the intersection of all these certainly is.
- wbl 7y ago
  You might want to try Ocaml.
dx87 7y ago
From what I can tell by reading what Go developers write, they like it precisely because it's not something to get excited over. It seems like the kind of language where once you learn it, you don't have to keep up with a bunch of blog posts detailing all the cool new things being added to it, and decisions over stuff like formatting are made for you. I primarily use Rust for hobby projects, and the steady stream of new features/libraries can get tiring. You don't have to use the new stuff in your own code, but if you want to use popular libraries, you'll probably be stuck using the new features. Making everything async seems to be the new hotness, and sometimes I wish the language would be nothing to get excited over.
- stoicShell 7y ago
  100% agreed, and you made me realize something. As someone who writes — I mean prose, whether fiction or not (mostly not: essays, technical, etc) — I had to come to terms quite early with the dichotomy you explain here. There is a place for the "beautiful language", the parts of it and the ways of using it that make it a pleasure, as a writer and as a reader. This, unsurprisingly, usually demands a whole lot of additional work on top of the 'direct meaning'. Then there's a place, in casual communication, in business, in marketing, in essays as well, in technical docs, in speeches, in a lot of places, for the 'direct meaning', or close to that. The efficient use of language, when all form recedes in favor of meaning, of concepts, of getting that 'other' to get what you mean. It's just that, in human language, you do it all with the same tools, we use formal or topical subsets of a vastly larger ensemble. In programming, we're more likely to use different languages [themselves subsets of human language if you think about it, but let's forget that for the sake of simplicity]. And there are programmers among us who love to dabble in the form, like some writers would spend 10%, twice, ten times the effort crafting just "better form" over an already well-defined idea/story. While other programmers, or at other times, just focus on getting things done. Cue the spectrum in-between. So it all depends what we put in our code, as programmers, as human beings I guess. Is that thing a personal statement? Or is it just garbage code to temporarily expedite some roadblock? How do we approach complexity, bottom-up from the simplest elements/code, or top-down with the most expressive almost-meta entities? Maybe some side-line out-of-the-box angle? See how we'd word all of these, in human languages, as in code. We just wouldn't say the same, nor code (select languages) the same. I don't know if I explained it well. But looking at it from a human language writer, it all seems clear now. The whole rat race of languages, the churches, the sheer effort put into form when meaning has already been solved 10 times by others, the strong NIH syndromes... it's all so common in traditional writers circles. We're all just writers, really!
- SomaticPirate 7y ago
  It also lends itself to patterns in code. One thing that learned about Python coming from Perl was there was a “Pythonic” solution. Go seems to take that idea further with gofmt and a small but powerful std lib. I can typically glance at how someone is configuring their http.Server and understand the intention of the code.
  - idoubtit 7y ago
    The "pythonic" way was a mantra that has been obsolete for a long time. With Python, there are many (unsatisfying) ways to declare dependencies, many ways to format code (I hope "black" will prevail), many ways to format a string, many ways to create a struct/record... The lack of quality batteries included also leads to "there is more than one way to do it" through the choice of unofficial libraries. My experience is that the extensive standard library of Go brings more normalisation.
- catalogia 7y ago
  I think there can exist a happy middleground between constant churn and what Go currently provides. Some nice quality of life features like pattern matching and list comprehensions would go a long way towards making it a more pleasant language, without making developers feel like they're in a constant struggle to stay current.
nordsieck 7y ago
> But what I can't really figure out is why so many devs love it. I think, in order to understand why so many people love Go, you first need to understand why so many people love C. Go is C with most of the warts removed (for application development). GC, easy strings, maps, easier first-class function syntax, code formatting, modern standard library, easy concurrency, etc. Yes, there are plenty of places that C can go that Go cannot - operating systems and embedded devices are high up on that list. But for back end application development, it's great as long as your application is of a moderate size and you don't need specialized data structures. That covers quite a bit of ground.
- firethief 7y ago
  > GC, easy strings, maps, easier first-class function syntax, code formatting, modern standard library, easy concurrency, etc. So what part of C is not in the list of warts averted in Go?
  - jlokier 7y ago
    > So what part of C is not in the list of warts averted in Go? A simple language with only a few things to learn. Everything built up from those few things.
    - firethief 7y ago
      Huh. "A simple X" is a wily phrase, because everything is exceedingly "simple" in the aspect its designer had in mind[1], but complex from other perspectives. C may be simple in terms of how you would describe it building on the interface provided by a typical CPU, but to someone who only knows Scheme or Haskell learning the machine model is no small task--I don't think the 683-page length of the C11 specification can be attributed to its authors being long-winded. I don't really see Go as having inherited C's simplicity-in-terms-of-differences-from-a-machine-model. If they were optimizing for the same kind of "simplicity" that C has, they'd have to be out of their minds to add garbage collection, strings, maps, lambdas, and goroutines. Go, like Scheme, Haskell, and python, is a different "simple" from C. 1: unless designed by a committee with no such single-minded aim
marcosdumay 7y ago
There's a class of problems (servers running a simple protocol) for what a basic type system, convenient green threads, and a lot of optmizations are all that you need for great results. For those Go would beat anything that lacks convenient green threads (Type Script included, also Java, C#, C++), anything that is dynamically typed, and anything that is interpreted.
FpUser 7y ago
The performance of Go is not particularly impressive. Especially when it is used to write busy servers with many simultaneous requests. And as a language it is not inspiring either. Not sure why business owners should love it either. Not enough features in the language coding productivity suffer in a long run. Also if the developer needs Go because other languages are "too complex" maybe said developer can't produce proper code anyways.
- WoodTree 7y ago
  Complex languages don’t result in better programs. Else we would see Scala and C++ everywhere instead of them being relegated to narrow niches.
  - baot 7y ago
    c++ is in narrow niches?!
    - WoodTree 7y ago
      Java killed it for general purpose use in the 90s. It’s never your first option unless you are in areas like games, graphics, some embedded work, or quantitative trading.
      - pnako 7y ago
        "All right, but apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, a fresh water system, and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?"
        WoodTree 7y ago
        The Romans or the Chinese?
        pnako 7y ago
bootlooped 7y ago
I find the tooling to be very attractive, especially since modules came out. go test, go mod, go vendor, etc... Working in the Go ecosystem is mostly pleasant and easy.
gsempe 7y ago
Go is mainly loved by devs who love to build products over to write beautiful code. Go is for product builders who use coding as a mean and not an end.
- nemo1618 7y ago
  Most of the "means vs. end" dichotomy occurs at a level above choice of language. Every language permits both beautiful code and ugly code. Every language allows you to optimize. I write Go every day and I strive to write beautiful and performant code, for the sake of writing beautiful and performant code. Go may not allow you express e.g. quicksort as beautifully as in Haskell, but its simplicity and pragmatism lend themselves to a different kind of beauty.
lonelappde 7y ago
There are two kinds of devs: Devs who mainly like the feeling of wll writing code, and devs who mainly like building products. Go is by the latter for the latter. It's bit meant to be exciting, it's meant to be effective, efficient, and reliable.

adtac 7y ago

Defers, channels, inexpensive goroutines, a mostly consistent standard library, very good performance, garbage collection, being similar to C, strongly typed, and readability are the reasons why I've enjoyed writing Go exclusively for the past couple of years. Almost none of these is exclusive to Go, but the intersection of all these certainly is.

wbl 7y ago
You might want to try Ocaml.

dx87 7y ago

From what I can tell by reading what Go developers write, they like it precisely because it's not something to get excited over. It seems like the kind of language where once you learn it, you don't have to keep up with a bunch of blog posts detailing all the cool new things being added to it, and decisions over stuff like formatting are made for you. I primarily use Rust for hobby projects, and the steady stream of new features/libraries can get tiring. You don't have to use the new stuff in your own code, but if you want to use popular libraries, you'll probably be stuck using the new features. Making everything async seems to be the new hotness, and sometimes I wish the language would be nothing to get excited over.

stoicShell 7y ago
100% agreed, and you made me realize something. As someone who writes — I mean prose, whether fiction or not (mostly not: essays, technical, etc) — I had to come to terms quite early with the dichotomy you explain here. There is a place for the "beautiful language", the parts of it and the ways of using it that make it a pleasure, as a writer and as a reader. This, unsurprisingly, usually demands a whole lot of additional work on top of the 'direct meaning'. Then there's a place, in casual communication, in business, in marketing, in essays as well, in technical docs, in speeches, in a lot of places, for the 'direct meaning', or close to that. The efficient use of language, when all form recedes in favor of meaning, of concepts, of getting that 'other' to get what you mean. It's just that, in human language, you do it all with the same tools, we use formal or topical subsets of a vastly larger ensemble. In programming, we're more likely to use different languages [themselves subsets of human language if you think about it, but let's forget that for the sake of simplicity]. And there are programmers among us who love to dabble in the form, like some writers would spend 10%, twice, ten times the effort crafting just "better form" over an already well-defined idea/story. While other programmers, or at other times, just focus on getting things done. Cue the spectrum in-between. So it all depends what we put in our code, as programmers, as human beings I guess. Is that thing a personal statement? Or is it just garbage code to temporarily expedite some roadblock? How do we approach complexity, bottom-up from the simplest elements/code, or top-down with the most expressive almost-meta entities? Maybe some side-line out-of-the-box angle? See how we'd word all of these, in human languages, as in code. We just wouldn't say the same, nor code (select languages) the same. I don't know if I explained it well. But looking at it from a human language writer, it all seems clear now. The whole rat race of languages, the churches, the sheer effort put into form when meaning has already been solved 10 times by others, the strong NIH syndromes... it's all so common in traditional writers circles. We're all just writers, really!
SomaticPirate 7y ago
It also lends itself to patterns in code. One thing that learned about Python coming from Perl was there was a “Pythonic” solution. Go seems to take that idea further with gofmt and a small but powerful std lib. I can typically glance at how someone is configuring their http.Server and understand the intention of the code.
- idoubtit 7y ago
  The "pythonic" way was a mantra that has been obsolete for a long time. With Python, there are many (unsatisfying) ways to declare dependencies, many ways to format code (I hope "black" will prevail), many ways to format a string, many ways to create a struct/record... The lack of quality batteries included also leads to "there is more than one way to do it" through the choice of unofficial libraries. My experience is that the extensive standard library of Go brings more normalisation.
catalogia 7y ago
I think there can exist a happy middleground between constant churn and what Go currently provides. Some nice quality of life features like pattern matching and list comprehensions would go a long way towards making it a more pleasant language, without making developers feel like they're in a constant struggle to stay current.

nordsieck 7y ago

> But what I can't really figure out is why so many devs love it. I think, in order to understand why so many people love Go, you first need to understand why so many people love C. Go is C with most of the warts removed (for application development). GC, easy strings, maps, easier first-class function syntax, code formatting, modern standard library, easy concurrency, etc. Yes, there are plenty of places that C can go that Go cannot - operating systems and embedded devices are high up on that list. But for back end application development, it's great as long as your application is of a moderate size and you don't need specialized data structures. That covers quite a bit of ground.

firethief 7y ago
> GC, easy strings, maps, easier first-class function syntax, code formatting, modern standard library, easy concurrency, etc. So what part of C is not in the list of warts averted in Go?
- jlokier 7y ago
  > So what part of C is not in the list of warts averted in Go? A simple language with only a few things to learn. Everything built up from those few things.
  - firethief 7y ago
    Huh. "A simple X" is a wily phrase, because everything is exceedingly "simple" in the aspect its designer had in mind[1], but complex from other perspectives. C may be simple in terms of how you would describe it building on the interface provided by a typical CPU, but to someone who only knows Scheme or Haskell learning the machine model is no small task--I don't think the 683-page length of the C11 specification can be attributed to its authors being long-winded. I don't really see Go as having inherited C's simplicity-in-terms-of-differences-from-a-machine-model. If they were optimizing for the same kind of "simplicity" that C has, they'd have to be out of their minds to add garbage collection, strings, maps, lambdas, and goroutines. Go, like Scheme, Haskell, and python, is a different "simple" from C. 1: unless designed by a committee with no such single-minded aim

marcosdumay 7y ago

There's a class of problems (servers running a simple protocol) for what a basic type system, convenient green threads, and a lot of optmizations are all that you need for great results. For those Go would beat anything that lacks convenient green threads (Type Script included, also Java, C#, C++), anything that is dynamically typed, and anything that is interpreted.

FpUser 7y ago

The performance of Go is not particularly impressive. Especially when it is used to write busy servers with many simultaneous requests. And as a language it is not inspiring either. Not sure why business owners should love it either. Not enough features in the language coding productivity suffer in a long run. Also if the developer needs Go because other languages are "too complex" maybe said developer can't produce proper code anyways.

WoodTree 7y ago
Complex languages don’t result in better programs. Else we would see Scala and C++ everywhere instead of them being relegated to narrow niches.
- baot 7y ago
  c++ is in narrow niches?!
  - WoodTree 7y ago
    Java killed it for general purpose use in the 90s. It’s never your first option unless you are in areas like games, graphics, some embedded work, or quantitative trading.
    - pnako 7y ago
      "All right, but apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, a fresh water system, and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?"
      - WoodTree 7y ago
        The Romans or the Chinese?
        pnako 7y ago

bootlooped 7y ago

I find the tooling to be very attractive, especially since modules came out. go test, go mod, go vendor, etc... Working in the Go ecosystem is mostly pleasant and easy.

gsempe 7y ago

Go is mainly loved by devs who love to build products over to write beautiful code. Go is for product builders who use coding as a mean and not an end.

nemo1618 7y ago
Most of the "means vs. end" dichotomy occurs at a level above choice of language. Every language permits both beautiful code and ugly code. Every language allows you to optimize. I write Go every day and I strive to write beautiful and performant code, for the sake of writing beautiful and performant code. Go may not allow you express e.g. quicksort as beautifully as in Haskell, but its simplicity and pragmatism lend themselves to a different kind of beauty.

lonelappde 7y ago

There are two kinds of devs: Devs who mainly like the feeling of wll writing code, and devs who mainly like building products. Go is by the latter for the latter. It's bit meant to be exciting, it's meant to be effective, efficient, and reliable.