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The biggest challenge is avoiding the tricks from languages that allow you to use the language to paper over questionable design choices. Go requires that you g

The biggest challenge is avoiding the tricks from languages that allow you to use the language to paper over questionable design choices. Go requires that you get the design right up front and provides few escape hatches to save you if you mess up. Which is a good thing, but makes the language (not just the syntax) difficult to learn compared to others.

TheDong 6y ago
Can you give examples of specific language features of go that prevent you from making questionable design choices, that require you to "get the design right up front"? When I hear that, the first things that come to mind are things like haskell's IO monad, which forces you to model IO better than go or most other languages, or haskell's other state monads which similarly force you to model state more explicitly. I think of rust's lifetime and ownership system, which forces you to correctly model the ownership of types and prevents quite a few bad design patterns (which I see constantly in go btw; the number of times I've seen races due to multiple goroutines writing to a struct is large, the number of times I've seen incorrect synchronization that rust would have prevented is large). I can't think of anything in go that pushes you towards designing your code well in go, especially when compared to languages with more complete type-systems.
- randomdata 6y ago
  > Can you give examples of specific language features of go that prevent you from making questionable design choices, that require you to "get the design right up front"? No, obviously. I said that Go doesn't give you an escape hatch if you screw up. It does nothing to protect you from screwing up. I specifically said that the challenge was in learning how to not screw up as the language doesn't help you deal with or avoid design mistakes.
  - TheDong 6y ago
    Aaah, I read "Go requires that you get the design right up front" totally wrong, as in "go prevents you from getting the design wrong", not "go lets you get the design wrong, and then doesn't help you". I still don't get your contrast to other languages though. Are there specific language features other languages have that let you paper over crappy designs?
enneff 6y ago
IMO Go’s escape hatch for screw ups is its superb refactor-ability.

TheDong 6y ago

Can you give examples of specific language features of go that prevent you from making questionable design choices, that require you to "get the design right up front"? When I hear that, the first things that come to mind are things like haskell's IO monad, which forces you to model IO better than go or most other languages, or haskell's other state monads which similarly force you to model state more explicitly. I think of rust's lifetime and ownership system, which forces you to correctly model the ownership of types and prevents quite a few bad design patterns (which I see constantly in go btw; the number of times I've seen races due to multiple goroutines writing to a struct is large, the number of times I've seen incorrect synchronization that rust would have prevented is large). I can't think of anything in go that pushes you towards designing your code well in go, especially when compared to languages with more complete type-systems.

randomdata 6y ago
> Can you give examples of specific language features of go that prevent you from making questionable design choices, that require you to "get the design right up front"? No, obviously. I said that Go doesn't give you an escape hatch if you screw up. It does nothing to protect you from screwing up. I specifically said that the challenge was in learning how to not screw up as the language doesn't help you deal with or avoid design mistakes.
- TheDong 6y ago
  Aaah, I read "Go requires that you get the design right up front" totally wrong, as in "go prevents you from getting the design wrong", not "go lets you get the design wrong, and then doesn't help you". I still don't get your contrast to other languages though. Are there specific language features other languages have that let you paper over crappy designs?

enneff 6y ago

IMO Go’s escape hatch for screw ups is its superb refactor-ability.