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As an experienced Java programmer , I decided to do a project in Golang to see for myself what the hype was all about. And it was...underwhelming. The Go plugin

by pyjug 5y ago

As an experienced Java programmer , I decided to do a project in Golang to see for myself what the hype was all about. And it was...underwhelming. The Go plugin for VScode barely works - terribly slow, inconsistent autocomplete, hanging during debugging etc. I had to pay for Goland just to get a reasonable experience which is still worse than Java+IntelliJ community edition. Language wise - you need for loops for everything, no maps or streams. Also where are the concurrent collections in the stdlib? I wonder if all the Go love here is from people who never worked in earnest with Java ? Or only worked with dynamic languages before?

void_mint 5y ago
It's interesting that you chose VSCode + Go plugin rather than IntelliJ Community + Go plugin?
- wolfi1 5y ago
  hmm, I even use VS Code for Java
  - void_mint 5y ago
    Sure - OP seemed like they were implying they're already comfortable with IntelliJ. If you're trying a new language, and then also trying new tools to learn that language, it sounds like you're taking on too much at once. If you're already comfortable with IntelliJ, you can continue to use IntelliJ.
- pyjug 5y ago
  Right, I wanted to have the “modern development experience” as much as possible. Most tutorials out there still recommend VSCode to get started with Go.
ilrwbwrkhv 5y ago
Yup many migrated from node js
dimitrios1 5y ago
This comment is so hilarious to me. I was a Java programmer for 8+ years. Go throws all the boilerplate away. The multiple layers of abstraction. The AbstractFactorySingletonProxyFactoryBeans. All the singleton static classes, and builder patterns, and the stuff that just makes me shudder these days. Instead what you get is a balance between needed features and beautiful simplicity. The code is almost always understandable in Go. It's right there in front of you! Yes! Everything is a loop or a "for range"! It's the most beautiful part. It means I can read a page or two of code and understand 100% exactly whats going on. Contrast that with Java, where you often had to dig, on average, 8 layers deep to get to the root functionality, it's a breath of fresh air. The best part about Go arguably is it's a get shit done language, and it detracts the type of architecture astronaut types that love to overcomplicate and overengineer everything, if not sheerly by the lack of ability to do so (which is why so many who love Go today fear the incoming generics) Anyways, just my two cents as a almost decade long "enterprise" java developer, who has used his fair share of netflix packages as well.
- voidfunc 5y ago
  > Go throws all the boilerplate away Wait, what? I spend my life nowadays writing boilerplate in Go. The language and ecosystem is riddled with boilerplate and needing to repeat yourself. That said, I find the language plenty productive, but concise and reusable Go is not. The rest of your post has nothing to do with the Java programming language and instead has to do with your frustration at the Java enterprise ecosystem, the desire to make things abstract for extendibility etc etc... considering Go is now being adopted heavily in those same enterprise shops and often being written by former Java developers I predict it will suffer a similar souring of public opinion by 2030 or so. Enterprise Go is coming.
  - tammerk 5y ago
    Difference between Go and Java, Java drives developers to write bloated code. Bunch of abstract classes, interfaces, fancy inheritance, getters/setters, OOP patterns, classes for anything and everything .. all in a different file. Normally, some code can fit in a single file, a logic can be a method but Java way of doing it in 20 files, 20 classes, 3 sub-classes, 3 interface implementations. I think this is the boilerplate that matters most. I think Go will not ever be as bad as Enterprise Java because language and community culture which is shaped by language, don't give you as much opportunity to abuse it. If Go gets some new features that may enable abusing it, then yeah, history will repeat :)
mrkeen 5y ago
> Language wise - you need for loops for everything, no maps or streams. I think that's library wise. Language-wise I wish I could write a map interface in Java. But soon Go will get half-arsed generics and I won't be able to write a map interface in that either!
rakoo 5y ago
> Also where are the concurrent collections in the stdlib? I think this is the crux of your issues with Go. If you're going to learn a new language, learn the new language. Don't try to recreate your existing language with a different syntax. Java and Go have different strengths and weaknesses, and they are not used to build software with the same architecture. Java is useful for writing big monolithic servers while Go is better at building smaller independent modules communicating with each other, but there is much more to them than this. I work with Java but still prefer to use Go for my hobby projects because it makes concurrent processing much easier to reason about. Also it's far less tedious than Java to install and use, but the bar isn't very high to start with.
- gher-shyu3i 5y ago
  > Java is useful for writing big monolithic servers while Go is better at building smaller independent modules communicating with each other, but there is much more to them than this. There's nothing that makes Java any less suited than golang for writing small independent cross communicating modules. For all the hype in golang about it being useful for concurrency, the fact that it lacks a concurrent collections library sticks out to anyone who used it.
therealdrag0 5y ago
Totally agree. Except I went from Java to Scala to Go, so coming from Scala Go was even more underwhelming. Scala had just as simple aync sugar and doesn’t have stereotypical Java boilerplate, and had powerful collections functions. Golang felt like an antique.
- cies 5y ago
  > Golang felt like an antique. And, IMHO, no implicit nulls, proper sum types, pattern matching was all it needed be considered modern. If left the last 40 years of compiler/language research outcomes on the table. Such a pity. And give that the std lib is not riddled with implicit nulls that mean all kinds of things (like any kind of error, or absence), this will not be fixed in the next decade. What a waste.
  - EdwardDiego 5y ago
    Omg, implicit nils and "nil values" really bugged me.
jchw 5y ago
> I wonder if all the Go love here is from people who never worked in earnest with Java ? Or only worked with dynamic languages before? This is the type of non-constructive statement I’m used to seeing on programming forums elsewhere on the Internet. The thing is, it’s just dismissive and irritating. All it says is, “I don’t understand why this thing is popular. Could it be that all of the proponents are simply inexperienced and don’t know any better?” — of course it’s possible, the same way that it’s possible that everyone who says my cooking is terrible just has bad taste and doesn’t understand good cuisine. It could just be that your experience of Go was not very complete. There are certainly sore spots in Go. Maybe gopls was broken when you tried (I just tested and VSCode Go is faster than Goland on my machine, so I actually suspect something was wrong.) Maybe you picked use cases that it was just not very good for, or possibly you missed some of its utility in the time that you used it. There’s no way for me to know. I’m sure you have enough Java experience to see how someone fiddling with Maven, Eclipse, Spring, Hibernate, Guice... and running into problems could spoil them on the language or its ecosystem early on. And yet, what disappoints me more is that when I saw this comment, it was the second highest on the page. Meaning the statement seems to have resonated rather than raising red flags. I kind of get it. Go is one of the trendiest languages to hate now. I would guess it is in third behind Perl and PHP. Don’t get me wrong — many people unfairly hated Java too, but let’s face it, it hasn’t been trendy to baselessly hate Java in a long time. Especially not with how much it has changed and improved. I still don’t like that people do this. It feels like on at minimum a weekly basis I get chastised or see others get chastised for expressing our satisfaction with Go. Thankfully it is uncommon here, but in other online programming circles it is common enough. Imagine you’re a beginner who is learning Go as a first programming language and they read your message. What message is it really sending? Perhaps you did not mean for this to come off this way, but to me this is the language of condescension.
- romwell 5y ago
  What disappoints me upon seeing your comment is that someone chose to write nearly 400 words to complain about how irritating the parent's one-question was without answering the said question in the slightest.
  - 5y ago

by pyjug 5y ago

void_mint 5y ago

It's interesting that you chose VSCode + Go plugin rather than IntelliJ Community + Go plugin?

wolfi1 5y ago
hmm, I even use VS Code for Java
- void_mint 5y ago
  Sure - OP seemed like they were implying they're already comfortable with IntelliJ. If you're trying a new language, and then also trying new tools to learn that language, it sounds like you're taking on too much at once. If you're already comfortable with IntelliJ, you can continue to use IntelliJ.
pyjug 5y ago
Right, I wanted to have the “modern development experience” as much as possible. Most tutorials out there still recommend VSCode to get started with Go.

ilrwbwrkhv 5y ago

Yup many migrated from node js

dimitrios1 5y ago

This comment is so hilarious to me. I was a Java programmer for 8+ years. Go throws all the boilerplate away. The multiple layers of abstraction. The AbstractFactorySingletonProxyFactoryBeans. All the singleton static classes, and builder patterns, and the stuff that just makes me shudder these days. Instead what you get is a balance between needed features and beautiful simplicity. The code is almost always understandable in Go. It's right there in front of you! Yes! Everything is a loop or a "for range"! It's the most beautiful part. It means I can read a page or two of code and understand 100% exactly whats going on. Contrast that with Java, where you often had to dig, on average, 8 layers deep to get to the root functionality, it's a breath of fresh air. The best part about Go arguably is it's a get shit done language, and it detracts the type of architecture astronaut types that love to overcomplicate and overengineer everything, if not sheerly by the lack of ability to do so (which is why so many who love Go today fear the incoming generics) Anyways, just my two cents as a almost decade long "enterprise" java developer, who has used his fair share of netflix packages as well.

voidfunc 5y ago
> Go throws all the boilerplate away Wait, what? I spend my life nowadays writing boilerplate in Go. The language and ecosystem is riddled with boilerplate and needing to repeat yourself. That said, I find the language plenty productive, but concise and reusable Go is not. The rest of your post has nothing to do with the Java programming language and instead has to do with your frustration at the Java enterprise ecosystem, the desire to make things abstract for extendibility etc etc... considering Go is now being adopted heavily in those same enterprise shops and often being written by former Java developers I predict it will suffer a similar souring of public opinion by 2030 or so. Enterprise Go is coming.
- tammerk 5y ago
  Difference between Go and Java, Java drives developers to write bloated code. Bunch of abstract classes, interfaces, fancy inheritance, getters/setters, OOP patterns, classes for anything and everything .. all in a different file. Normally, some code can fit in a single file, a logic can be a method but Java way of doing it in 20 files, 20 classes, 3 sub-classes, 3 interface implementations. I think this is the boilerplate that matters most. I think Go will not ever be as bad as Enterprise Java because language and community culture which is shaped by language, don't give you as much opportunity to abuse it. If Go gets some new features that may enable abusing it, then yeah, history will repeat :)

mrkeen 5y ago

> Language wise - you need for loops for everything, no maps or streams. I think that's library wise. Language-wise I wish I could write a map interface in Java. But soon Go will get half-arsed generics and I won't be able to write a map interface in that either!

rakoo 5y ago

> Also where are the concurrent collections in the stdlib? I think this is the crux of your issues with Go. If you're going to learn a new language, learn the new language. Don't try to recreate your existing language with a different syntax. Java and Go have different strengths and weaknesses, and they are not used to build software with the same architecture. Java is useful for writing big monolithic servers while Go is better at building smaller independent modules communicating with each other, but there is much more to them than this. I work with Java but still prefer to use Go for my hobby projects because it makes concurrent processing much easier to reason about. Also it's far less tedious than Java to install and use, but the bar isn't very high to start with.

gher-shyu3i 5y ago
> Java is useful for writing big monolithic servers while Go is better at building smaller independent modules communicating with each other, but there is much more to them than this. There's nothing that makes Java any less suited than golang for writing small independent cross communicating modules. For all the hype in golang about it being useful for concurrency, the fact that it lacks a concurrent collections library sticks out to anyone who used it.

therealdrag0 5y ago

Totally agree. Except I went from Java to Scala to Go, so coming from Scala Go was even more underwhelming. Scala had just as simple aync sugar and doesn’t have stereotypical Java boilerplate, and had powerful collections functions. Golang felt like an antique.

cies 5y ago
> Golang felt like an antique. And, IMHO, no implicit nulls, proper sum types, pattern matching was all it needed be considered modern. If left the last 40 years of compiler/language research outcomes on the table. Such a pity. And give that the std lib is not riddled with implicit nulls that mean all kinds of things (like any kind of error, or absence), this will not be fixed in the next decade. What a waste.
- EdwardDiego 5y ago
  Omg, implicit nils and "nil values" really bugged me.

jchw 5y ago

> I wonder if all the Go love here is from people who never worked in earnest with Java ? Or only worked with dynamic languages before? This is the type of non-constructive statement I’m used to seeing on programming forums elsewhere on the Internet. The thing is, it’s just dismissive and irritating. All it says is, “I don’t understand why this thing is popular. Could it be that all of the proponents are simply inexperienced and don’t know any better?” — of course it’s possible, the same way that it’s possible that everyone who says my cooking is terrible just has bad taste and doesn’t understand good cuisine. It could just be that your experience of Go was not very complete. There are certainly sore spots in Go. Maybe gopls was broken when you tried (I just tested and VSCode Go is faster than Goland on my machine, so I actually suspect something was wrong.) Maybe you picked use cases that it was just not very good for, or possibly you missed some of its utility in the time that you used it. There’s no way for me to know. I’m sure you have enough Java experience to see how someone fiddling with Maven, Eclipse, Spring, Hibernate, Guice... and running into problems could spoil them on the language or its ecosystem early on. And yet, what disappoints me more is that when I saw this comment, it was the second highest on the page. Meaning the statement seems to have resonated rather than raising red flags. I kind of get it. Go is one of the trendiest languages to hate now. I would guess it is in third behind Perl and PHP. Don’t get me wrong — many people unfairly hated Java too, but let’s face it, it hasn’t been trendy to baselessly hate Java in a long time. Especially not with how much it has changed and improved. I still don’t like that people do this. It feels like on at minimum a weekly basis I get chastised or see others get chastised for expressing our satisfaction with Go. Thankfully it is uncommon here, but in other online programming circles it is common enough. Imagine you’re a beginner who is learning Go as a first programming language and they read your message. What message is it really sending? Perhaps you did not mean for this to come off this way, but to me this is the language of condescension.

romwell 5y ago
What disappoints me upon seeing your comment is that someone chose to write nearly 400 words to complain about how irritating the parent's one-question was without answering the said question in the slightest.
- 5y ago