4 ms·

If you were using Go for those four years, you'd also see very little of the criticisms regularly leveled at Go. What you see on the internet is the union of ev

by dnr 7y ago

If you were using Go for those four years, you'd also see very little of the criticisms regularly leveled at Go. What you see on the internet is the union of everyone's complaints and frustrations. Each individual sees only some of those, maybe even none depending on the type of work they're doing. And the ones that are generally happy don't tend to post big rants, so the overall impression of an outsider can be pretty skewed.

pmarreck 7y ago
> If you were using Go for those four years, you'd also see very little of the criticisms regularly leveled at Go. That's bullshit. When I worked in the Ruby on Rails space, I saw critisms quite often... for example of the "one size fits all" way-too-large-surface-area library design (see: ActiveSupport) or the "fat model" design trend at the time... I even PRODUCED some of these criticisms myself. Heck, the bug that made me leave the space took a month to track down and had to do with nondeterminate behavior when merging a Hash with a HashWithIndifferentAccess (this was not my code, I would have not written it the way it was written, but it was a bug I was assigned to of someone else's code) because the Ruby language did not see these as two distinct "types" and simply went ahead as if they were both regular Hashes, which caused HWIA keys to get overwritten unexpectedly/nondeterministically... that was the last straw at the time. And when I worked in .NET/ASP prior to that, I saw (and witnessed) MANY criticisms of the language and API such as how easy it was to produce difficult-to-test spaghetti code. And while all this was happening I was also working on frontend code in JS and needless to say there have been A LOT of JS criticisms over the years and I've seen most of them. So yeah, maybe try again with less BS. The biggest criticism I can produce of Elixir (and more generally the BEAM VM) is that too few people understand its advantages and too many people actively misinform others about it. (OK, one more criticism, but it is a more general criticism of functional immutable languages: A handful of algorithms perform suboptimally in a language that does not even permit mutation, relative to a language that does.)
- dnr 7y ago
  I think you might be reading an unintended meaning into that sentence. I'm talking about the experience of using Go vs. what people write about it, not about your experiences with other languages (which I have no intention of invalidating). I was pointing out that sometimes one can get a skewed perspective of the typical experience by reading blog posts and things (which by definition are written by the more vocal members of a community). I did use Go professionally for about five years, and read lots of criticisms of it (and still do out of curiosity). Most of them struck me as just not a big deal in practice. When I had to write some list-processing code that could be greatly simplified with generics (a few times per year), I just sighed and typed it out and moved on to a more interesting thing. When I had some repetitive error-handling code, I refactored it or wrote some helper functions. The dependency stuff was annoying when starting a new project, but once you pick a dependency manager/vendoring tool it's fairly straightforward (and of course now this is included). Certainly, the language and ecosystem has warts and frustrating things. Maybe Elixir has fewer warts, I don't know. But overall the experience of using Go is fairly smooth and boring and productive. The things that people like to complain about don't really register in day-to-day usage. That's not BS, that's my personal experience.
  - pdimitar 7y ago
    Well, you might have the Stockholm syndrome. :D But yeah, we all have to deal with some idiosyncrasies with our languages/tools of choice. It’s inevitable. For the record, I really love Elixir but it’s quite easy to swallow/ignore errors there as well. (To translate one of the Go’s criticisms.) So I get what you’re saying. But IMO the outsiders’ perspective is valuable because it outlines stuff we have gotten used to, and they might not be willing to do that. So such criticisms might be minor for you and me but they add much-needed nuance in the long run, I believe.
  - pmarreck 7y ago
    Fair enough. And truth be told, a lot of the issues I encountered in the languages I mentioned were from other people’s flawed code designs, not my own.
whateveracct 7y ago
I've been using Go for years. It works, but it's mostly despite bad design issues and because of network effects/money+time put into the project. Not impressive at all.
neop1x 7y ago
You can find rants on any language because nothing can ever be perfect. Everything has pros and cons. https://yourlanguagesucks.com https://yourlanguagesucks.com

by dnr 7y ago

pmarreck 7y ago

> If you were using Go for those four years, you'd also see very little of the criticisms regularly leveled at Go. That's bullshit. When I worked in the Ruby on Rails space, I saw critisms quite often... for example of the "one size fits all" way-too-large-surface-area library design (see: ActiveSupport) or the "fat model" design trend at the time... I even PRODUCED some of these criticisms myself. Heck, the bug that made me leave the space took a month to track down and had to do with nondeterminate behavior when merging a Hash with a HashWithIndifferentAccess (this was not my code, I would have not written it the way it was written, but it was a bug I was assigned to of someone else's code) because the Ruby language did not see these as two distinct "types" and simply went ahead as if they were both regular Hashes, which caused HWIA keys to get overwritten unexpectedly/nondeterministically... that was the last straw at the time. And when I worked in .NET/ASP prior to that, I saw (and witnessed) MANY criticisms of the language and API such as how easy it was to produce difficult-to-test spaghetti code. And while all this was happening I was also working on frontend code in JS and needless to say there have been A LOT of JS criticisms over the years and I've seen most of them. So yeah, maybe try again with less BS. The biggest criticism I can produce of Elixir (and more generally the BEAM VM) is that too few people understand its advantages and too many people actively misinform others about it. (OK, one more criticism, but it is a more general criticism of functional immutable languages: A handful of algorithms perform suboptimally in a language that does not even permit mutation, relative to a language that does.)

dnr 7y ago
I think you might be reading an unintended meaning into that sentence. I'm talking about the experience of using Go vs. what people write about it, not about your experiences with other languages (which I have no intention of invalidating). I was pointing out that sometimes one can get a skewed perspective of the typical experience by reading blog posts and things (which by definition are written by the more vocal members of a community). I did use Go professionally for about five years, and read lots of criticisms of it (and still do out of curiosity). Most of them struck me as just not a big deal in practice. When I had to write some list-processing code that could be greatly simplified with generics (a few times per year), I just sighed and typed it out and moved on to a more interesting thing. When I had some repetitive error-handling code, I refactored it or wrote some helper functions. The dependency stuff was annoying when starting a new project, but once you pick a dependency manager/vendoring tool it's fairly straightforward (and of course now this is included). Certainly, the language and ecosystem has warts and frustrating things. Maybe Elixir has fewer warts, I don't know. But overall the experience of using Go is fairly smooth and boring and productive. The things that people like to complain about don't really register in day-to-day usage. That's not BS, that's my personal experience.
- pdimitar 7y ago
  Well, you might have the Stockholm syndrome. :D But yeah, we all have to deal with some idiosyncrasies with our languages/tools of choice. It’s inevitable. For the record, I really love Elixir but it’s quite easy to swallow/ignore errors there as well. (To translate one of the Go’s criticisms.) So I get what you’re saying. But IMO the outsiders’ perspective is valuable because it outlines stuff we have gotten used to, and they might not be willing to do that. So such criticisms might be minor for you and me but they add much-needed nuance in the long run, I believe.
- pmarreck 7y ago
  Fair enough. And truth be told, a lot of the issues I encountered in the languages I mentioned were from other people’s flawed code designs, not my own.

whateveracct 7y ago

I've been using Go for years. It works, but it's mostly despite bad design issues and because of network effects/money+time put into the project. Not impressive at all.

neop1x 7y ago

You can find rants on any language because nothing can ever be perfect. Everything has pros and cons. https://yourlanguagesucks.com https://yourlanguagesucks.com