3 ms·

> I think people complain about Go because it's not the hammer for their nail. Or it's _almost_ the correct hammer! If they'd just fix those damn

_huayra_ 6y ago
It's the correct hammer for a company that employees tons of people who, for the most part, don't really care about the craft of programming and don't want to be bothered by learning anything difficult. They just want to ship their features on time and get their year-end bonus or whatever pat on the head. Even at a company like Google, I don't think most programmers are really pushing their understanding of software design or tools or techniques. They learn all the silly interview stuff about red-black trees then are just happy using coding within the well-defined bumper car arena of Google's frameworks and coding guidelines (e.g. Golang with no "hidden code" like in C++, where not writing certain things causes the compiler to generate stuff for you). We all read Hacker News and generally are excited by new advances in things (e.g. C++ concepts! No more stupid SFINAE!), but most people at big companies don't. It's truly a testament to the genius of Go that it solves this problem: much faster than Java, not complicated because most programmers at Big Corp can't deal with complexity (e.g. no exceptions in Google's C++ coding guideline), and understandable without too much effort by the average programmer at Google. We all understand what it looks like without this effort: The Monolith of Bug Spaghetti Code I work for an extremely large software company that is stuck on C for decades. I try to use C++ where I can, but I usually get shot down in code review with a message of "C++ is too complicated for your colleagues to understand what you did". To solve the code mess, they implement their own languages to generate the boilerplate C (e.g. like protobufs, but poorly done and NIH because some guy wanted a promotion to "Principal Engineer"). As much as I dislike Go, I would take Go over the current situation I'm in...
- philosopher1234 6y ago
  This is so arrogant. Simplicity of Go is a boon for everyone, including super-geniuses like yourself. Keeping the language and ecosystem as simple as possible means you can operate with lower cognitive load, and devote more of your mind to your current task.
  - _huayra_ 6y ago
    Simple languages are great, but simple does not necessarily mean less powerful. C is a simple language (albeit with many footguns) and the ecosystem is simple as possible (make and friends, gcc/clang, etc), but it can be extremely difficult. Swift is a great example of what go could be. It includes a lot of powerful features (e.g. generics, lacking in Go), but the language is designed so that its easy to start without having to learn advanced language features; one can slowly accumulate these more advanced tools as one progresses. Scala is also like this; a lot of Scala code is basically just less verbose Java. This is in stark contrast to languages like Haskell or Rust, which one has to very quickly learn myriad details about things to be productive (e.g. about laziness and the data / typeclass split in Haskell compared to standard OO, or about the borrow checker in Rust). Arguably these "big brain languages for super geniuses" distinguish themselves by these features, but it inherently makes them less simple. It's certainly a boon to everyone (including "supergeniuses") that Go has its design for the same reason Python has its design: simplicity begets a great ecosystem. I still use Python all the time because despite its mess of packaging, dynamic typing, and painfully slow execution, there are so many great projects. Go also produces great tools that I enjoy every day (e.g. hugo and kubernetes) and I'm thankful that the language enabled folks to write these applications that run super fast and don't crash because some rarely-exercised code path referred to an undefined object attribute.

_huayra_ 6y ago

It's the correct hammer for a company that employees tons of people who, for the most part, don't really care about the craft of programming and don't want to be bothered by learning anything difficult. They just want to ship their features on time and get their year-end bonus or whatever pat on the head. Even at a company like Google, I don't think most programmers are really pushing their understanding of software design or tools or techniques. They learn all the silly interview stuff about red-black trees then are just happy using coding within the well-defined bumper car arena of Google's frameworks and coding guidelines (e.g. Golang with no "hidden code" like in C++, where not writing certain things causes the compiler to generate stuff for you). We all read Hacker News and generally are excited by new advances in things (e.g. C++ concepts! No more stupid SFINAE!), but most people at big companies don't. It's truly a testament to the genius of Go that it solves this problem: much faster than Java, not complicated because most programmers at Big Corp can't deal with complexity (e.g. no exceptions in Google's C++ coding guideline), and understandable without too much effort by the average programmer at Google. We all understand what it looks like without this effort: The Monolith of Bug Spaghetti Code I work for an extremely large software company that is stuck on C for decades. I try to use C++ where I can, but I usually get shot down in code review with a message of "C++ is too complicated for your colleagues to understand what you did". To solve the code mess, they implement their own languages to generate the boilerplate C (e.g. like protobufs, but poorly done and NIH because some guy wanted a promotion to "Principal Engineer"). As much as I dislike Go, I would take Go over the current situation I'm in...

philosopher1234 6y ago
This is so arrogant. Simplicity of Go is a boon for everyone, including super-geniuses like yourself. Keeping the language and ecosystem as simple as possible means you can operate with lower cognitive load, and devote more of your mind to your current task.
- _huayra_ 6y ago
  Simple languages are great, but simple does not necessarily mean less powerful. C is a simple language (albeit with many footguns) and the ecosystem is simple as possible (make and friends, gcc/clang, etc), but it can be extremely difficult. Swift is a great example of what go could be. It includes a lot of powerful features (e.g. generics, lacking in Go), but the language is designed so that its easy to start without having to learn advanced language features; one can slowly accumulate these more advanced tools as one progresses. Scala is also like this; a lot of Scala code is basically just less verbose Java. This is in stark contrast to languages like Haskell or Rust, which one has to very quickly learn myriad details about things to be productive (e.g. about laziness and the data / typeclass split in Haskell compared to standard OO, or about the borrow checker in Rust). Arguably these "big brain languages for super geniuses" distinguish themselves by these features, but it inherently makes them less simple. It's certainly a boon to everyone (including "supergeniuses") that Go has its design for the same reason Python has its design: simplicity begets a great ecosystem. I still use Python all the time because despite its mess of packaging, dynamic typing, and painfully slow execution, there are so many great projects. Go also produces great tools that I enjoy every day (e.g. hugo and kubernetes) and I'm thankful that the language enabled folks to write these applications that run super fast and don't crash because some rarely-exercised code path referred to an undefined object attribute.