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> I recently got a DevOps job that mostly involves writing a new backend system in Go completely from scratch. If this wasn't on the front page of HN I'd have

> I recently got a DevOps job that mostly involves writing a new backend system in Go completely from scratch. If this wasn't on the front page of HN I'd have stopped reading here, but it is, so I didn't, then I regretted it.

thiht 6y ago
Can you at least explain why?
- idolaspecus 6y ago
  For the same reason as if it had said “I recently got a React dev job which mostly consists of writing Kubernetes deployments.” It sounds like the beginning of an article which uses buzzwords without a lot of depth.
EdwardDiego 6y ago
What offends you in that statement? FWIW, I, who is usually writing JVM apps in Java/Kotlin occasionally Scala, had an app to write that that extensively used K8s APIs, and I found that the best client API was (naturally, considering the makeup of the K8s ecosystem) the Go one, so I wrote the app in Go. I had to overcome some common Go issues (use a map[t]interface{} when you need "is x in a list of unique elements", if you need more advanced set operations on custom types, you're going to need to generate code or hard code each implementation, because generics are for suckers, allegedly. Hit some issues around channels and blocking reads and buffering, but worked around them easily enough using pointers and locks where channels weren't appropriate) But aside from the limitations of Golang, over all it was a rather straight-forward experience. Stuff worked, tools worked, Intellij IDEA integration worked, Go's module system worked (DIAF $GOPATH), code ran, no worries. Will say though, Go logging realllllly needs some work from the community. An SLF4J equivalent at least. I used logrus as my logging library as it gave me the easiest route to making my logs go to Kafka in Logstash format, but it has some insane defaults - like the log event timestamp defaulting to "seconds since start-up". Oh, and be very careful with named returns. Naming a return, but then assigning nothing to it, will compile. Which is, to say the least, rather contrary to how most of Go works.
- AsyncAwait 6y ago
  > Naming a return, but then assigning nothing to it, will compile. This, I believe, comes down to Go having sane default values i.e. if you name a return of type string and assign nothing to it, you'd get "", which is a valid string value and something you can check against. But I agree it should at least be a lint warning.
  - EdwardDiego 6y ago
    Yeah, I didn't quite realise it actually initialised the variable when I first started using it. I mean, as far as footguns go, it's a pretty minor one, and over all, I quite enjoyed my Go experience, it was very easy as a Go beginner to write code that worked.

thiht 6y ago

Can you at least explain why?

idolaspecus 6y ago
For the same reason as if it had said “I recently got a React dev job which mostly consists of writing Kubernetes deployments.” It sounds like the beginning of an article which uses buzzwords without a lot of depth.

EdwardDiego 6y ago

What offends you in that statement? FWIW, I, who is usually writing JVM apps in Java/Kotlin occasionally Scala, had an app to write that that extensively used K8s APIs, and I found that the best client API was (naturally, considering the makeup of the K8s ecosystem) the Go one, so I wrote the app in Go. I had to overcome some common Go issues (use a map[t]interface{} when you need "is x in a list of unique elements", if you need more advanced set operations on custom types, you're going to need to generate code or hard code each implementation, because generics are for suckers, allegedly. Hit some issues around channels and blocking reads and buffering, but worked around them easily enough using pointers and locks where channels weren't appropriate) But aside from the limitations of Golang, over all it was a rather straight-forward experience. Stuff worked, tools worked, Intellij IDEA integration worked, Go's module system worked (DIAF $GOPATH), code ran, no worries. Will say though, Go logging realllllly needs some work from the community. An SLF4J equivalent at least. I used logrus as my logging library as it gave me the easiest route to making my logs go to Kafka in Logstash format, but it has some insane defaults - like the log event timestamp defaulting to "seconds since start-up". Oh, and be very careful with named returns. Naming a return, but then assigning nothing to it, will compile. Which is, to say the least, rather contrary to how most of Go works.

AsyncAwait 6y ago
> Naming a return, but then assigning nothing to it, will compile. This, I believe, comes down to Go having sane default values i.e. if you name a return of type string and assign nothing to it, you'd get "", which is a valid string value and something you can check against. But I agree it should at least be a lint warning.
- EdwardDiego 6y ago
  Yeah, I didn't quite realise it actually initialised the variable when I first started using it. I mean, as far as footguns go, it's a pretty minor one, and over all, I quite enjoyed my Go experience, it was very easy as a Go beginner to write code that worked.