11 ms·

The pleasure of writing Go

39 points by elementi 5y ago

eko 5y ago
I am working with Go with more than 3 years quite full time and I could say that it's a real pleasure to work with a performant language. After having some internal libraries to make repetitive jobs (while waiting for generics in Go 1.18), that's a good match for all the team! That's also a well-documented language and easy to get started in!
- elementi 5y ago
  I just started a month ago. Man, I literally became again a full time developer. No stress, only ideas, beautiful code that is a little bit verbose but really understandable. I think I could explain my code ELI7.
  - eko 5y ago
    That's great. Thank you for your feedback!
kyleee 5y ago
Beautiful website by the way
- elementi 5y ago
  We do not like the over-fancy CSS. By the way, we love UX, not UI.
acchow 5y ago
Because Go doesn't support userland generic types, I see liberal use of `interface{}` types in APIs. There must be a better way.
- eko 5y ago
  Generics are coming in next version, go 1.18 in around 6 months ;)
  - elementi 5y ago
    That would be such great! I'm pretty new with Golang, where could I keep myself updated with the latest news?
    - henvic 5y ago
      I'd say keeping an eye in the issue tracker https://golang.org/issues https://golang.org/issues + golang-nuts mailing list https://groups.google.com/g/golang-nuts?pli=1 https://groups.google.com/g/golang-nuts?pli=1 might be a good start. I wrote an article about where to find Go-related content a while ago: https://henvic.dev/posts/go/ https://henvic.dev/posts/go/
      - elementi 5y ago
        Thanks a lot!!!
        Abishek_Muthian 5y ago
        I recommend https://golangnews.com/ https://golangnews.com/ too, Not just because of its utility or that it has HN interface but also because Kenny Grant has been contributing to the Go ecosystem for a long time and his code is a pleasure to read.
  - acchow 5y ago
    anxiously awaiting :)
- qaq 5y ago
  Well they will be landing pretty soon
- 5y ago
redisman 5y ago
Most of all, it’s simple. You can’t do fancy and clever stuff which might feel bad in the moment but 6 months from now you’ll be much happier to read the simple but slightly verbose version.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- elementi 5y ago
  I agree at 2000%!
- Scarbutt 5y ago
  I wouldn't call Go 'slightly verbose'.
  - adtac 5y ago
    Show me the least verbose way to process things in parallel in Python and I'll show you the least verbose way to do it in go: go f()
ppeetteerr 5y ago
> In Python, everything must be indented with 4 spaces. It was a great idea…. or not? I think probably it was one of the worst idea to apply in the development industry. Not even TABS! It’s literally impossible to have a consistent indentation, especially when you have more than 2 nested loops/functions/switch. Pretty sure that's not accurate. You can use whatever number of spaces, provided it's consistent for a specific block of code.
- elementi 5y ago
  Ups! As you might have noticed, I'm a beginner on Python but that thing was REALLY annoying. Nice to know that you can use whatever number of spaces, but... consistency is hard to keep with spaces (I'm not able :/)
  - m45t3r 5y ago
    As you said before, you can use tabs. You just need to use tabs everywhere (on Python 3, on Python 2 you can pretty much mix tabs and spaces, however this is a very bad idea).
  - qsort 5y ago
    I'm not a big fan of python but I use it a lot for quick stuff, and syntax is just a non-issue. Any half-decent editor will handle that for you (and yes, this includes Vim). Criticize the wonky static typing tools and I'm with you. Criticize the unpredictable performance and I'll join the choir. Criticize dependency management and I'll unleash my rage. But come on, this is just not a thing. IME even data analysts with non-cs backgrounds and very limited programming ability never see this as a problem. It's fine if you don't like it (I prefer my {s as well!) but I'll be honest: it really feels like a nitpick.
- m45t3r 5y ago
  Yeah, Python even support tabs. On Python 2 you could even mix tabs and spaces, but this turned out to be a very bad idea. So Python 3 enforces that the whole file uses either X number of spaces or tabs, you can use either of them.
- 5y ago
blondin 5y ago
go has been so far a very enjoyable and consistent language. you can come back to code you wrote several years ago and not be surprised by it. the other consistent programming language i know of is java. java code from ten years ago won't be surprising to any java programmer reading it today. programming language designers often forget how important consistency is. many languages have changed their syntax so much that we should just call them something else.
whalesalad 5y ago
Can anyone link to a project that they would consider elegant? I have never cruised through a golang project and felt that emotion.
- elementi 5y ago
  Is there anywhere a list of Golang projects made by developers around the world? Probably github search? Haha.
  - whalesalad 5y ago
    As an outsider, I am genuinely curious to hear what golang devs feel is elegant software to use as a model or inspiration.
  - fortzi 5y ago
    The commenter asked people for examples of projects that they think are elegant, no reason to be so disrespectful.
henning 5y ago
I've been paying the rent/mortgage with Python since 2013: > In Python, everything must be indented with 4 spaces no > It’s literally impossible to have a consistent indentation it's trivial > as most programmers will agree, they often make the code harder to understand when reading someone else’s work No, swapping things is easy to pattern match against once you know the language. This is even dumber than complaining about Lisp parentheses.
- elementi 5y ago
  Thanks for your feedback. We'll correct that thing about Python as soon as possible. However please agree with me that with an educational background of C/C++, learning Go was easier than learning Python.
  - uuidgen 5y ago
    I used to be a C++ dev for 10 years. I tried to learn go after hearing about how great it is. IMO - it's a hot garbage practical joke made by googlers that became popular because it was made by googlers and then it was too late to tell its was a prank. It's a corrupt amalgam of "clever hacks" and "only one good way to do things - my way". Its concurrency is awful, and makes shooting oneselves in a foot easy. Effective go teaching you how to basically make mutex using channels is just a practical joke, right? As for C++ and libraries - Boost was and is a big one. Want HTTP? There's a full server implementation you can reuse easily https://www.boost.org/doc/libs/1_55_0/doc/html/boost_asio/examples/cpp11_examples.html https://www.boost.org/doc/libs/1_55_0/doc/html/boost_asio/ex...
    - mxschumacher 5y ago
      Go's success in the cloud native infrastructure is really impressive - the language has enjoyed widespread adoption in many large engineering orgs. Having a hard time seeing where you're coming from when you talk about a "hot garbage practical joke"
      - uuidgen 5y ago
ricardobeat 5y ago
On nodejs and dependencies, it’s kind of irrelevant but I suggest the author check the size of their .go modules folder, it’s most likely also a few GB in size.
- elementi 5y ago
  Can nodejs be ran as a portable binary? (Electron?)
  - valbaca 5y ago
    pkg: https://github.com/vercel/pkg https://github.com/vercel/pkg
umvi 5y ago
go is indeed a pleasure to write, especially if you have vscode auto-format on save with the official go formatter. Not worrying about getting the formatting just right takes a huge cognitive load off I didn't even know I had. One minor mistake in the article: > Fortunately, Python and Go removes colons by default at the end of every expression. To quote someone, “Colons are for compilers, not for human!”. Just to clarify for non-native english speakers, a colon is ":" a semi-colon is ";"
- elementi 5y ago
  Ah. I meant semi-colon. Ups ^_^
aingisni_del 5y ago
This is great. I too enjoy working with Go coming from a Swift, Obj-C, Java and C# background. The problem that the latter 4 languages have is keyword bloat. For example, Swift has 23 keywords just for declarations (Source: https://docs.swift.org/swift-book/ReferenceManual/LexicalStructure.html https://docs.swift.org/swift-book/ReferenceManual/LexicalStr...) The entire Go language has 25 keywords. That's it. That includes declarations, control, errors and multithreading. Language design of the latter 4 along with this keyword bloat make for unfettered methods of writing code. Want a simple HTTP request to process JSON? You can open a Go file from the last 5+ years and expect that to look exactly the same. Try doing that in the other languages, and you will find every possible combination of the same thing. Generics has so much indirection and emphasis placed on re-usability, that readability for debugging and understanding become exponentially difficult. In fact, almost every use of generics ultimately ends in type erasure or forced casting. And let's be honest: every generic has to conform to a super generic or protocol, so it's not really as generic as you thought it was going to be. Highly opinionated, reverse compatibility and the lack of generics make Go extremely powerful for it's purpose. Type safety make for easy refactoring, and when refactoring needs to take place, your code is forced to follow the conventions laid out in idiomatic Go: https://golang.org/doc/effective_go https://golang.org/doc/effective_go
- aingisni_del 5y ago
  Oh, another thing. Their date formatter is hilariously easy to remember: https://pkg.go.dev/time#pkg-constants https://pkg.go.dev/time#pkg-constants "01/02 03:04:05PM '06 -0700" // The reference time, in numerical order.
  - SkeuomorphicBee 5y ago
    That is a very interesting approach to the problem. It is just a shame they didn't go with the third of February 2001 for their reference date, that would have been even easier to remember.
- bobthebuilders 5y ago
  You do know go is adding generics right?
hsn915 5y ago
I regularly write Go code and I mostly enjoy programming in the language, but this post captures nothing important about what makes writing code in Go pleasurable. Having biultin library features is nice but is not the reason. Python also has a lot of builtin library features, but I don't enjoy working with it. Static typing matters a great deal, but Java is also statically typed yet I don't enjoy working with it. For me I think what makes Go pleasurable to write in is that it has structs with value semantics and it also has pointers, and it also has none of the recent (incorrectly labeled "modern") ideas such as enfoced null-checking or enforced error handling. I can write the code in a very direct and straight forward way. I can decide myself how much abstraction to introduce. I can decide myself which errors are worth handling and which are not. I can write functions that take complicated arguments as structs without worrying about how it will degrade performance. Because structs have value semantics, creating an instance of a struct will not trigger a heap allocation unless you return a pointer to it or let it escape the current scope via other means. This matters a lot because a lot of performance degradation in other languages comes not only from being interpreted but from the model of programming that requires lots of tiny allocation. Another thing that makes go pleasurable is that a package is well defined and you can import packages written by other people. But that's only secondary IMO. Go's performance is reasonable but it's far from C/C++ level. I think a well written server in C/C++ can outperform a go webserver by a factor of 10. That said, Go is about 40x faster than Python so that's great, and it means you can write a program in Go and run it on a single machine to get the same performance to a website written in Python and hosted on 40 web servers with an insane infrastructure and requires an entire team to manage. That said, the language also has some warts, such as lack of real typed enums that can be introspected. For example, there's currently no way to dynamically introspect an enum type and find out all the defined values/constants. You must resort to code generation. Also the lack of generics, but hopefully those will land soon (within a year from now, if nothing goes wrong). But, what the language lacks in features, it compensates for in tooling. No where else have I seen a language that makes it such a breeze to cross compile. I can write code on my macbook and compile it for linux to get a valid linux executable binary that I can then `scp` to a server and have it running right away. The compiler speed is not the greatest but it's reasonable compared to pretty much everything else out there.
- 5y ago
password4321 5y ago
Interesting content marketing piece for an invoice PDF generator leveraging wkhtmltopdf. I would like to hear more from people working with PDF directly in Go.
styluss 5y ago
Go is really good and fun to write until you have to care how you write it. Adding sync.Pool, limiting concurrency, these are not some of my favourite things

39 points by elementi 5y ago

eko 5y ago

I am working with Go with more than 3 years quite full time and I could say that it's a real pleasure to work with a performant language. After having some internal libraries to make repetitive jobs (while waiting for generics in Go 1.18), that's a good match for all the team! That's also a well-documented language and easy to get started in!

elementi 5y ago
I just started a month ago. Man, I literally became again a full time developer. No stress, only ideas, beautiful code that is a little bit verbose but really understandable. I think I could explain my code ELI7.
- eko 5y ago
  That's great. Thank you for your feedback!

kyleee 5y ago

Beautiful website by the way

elementi 5y ago
We do not like the over-fancy CSS. By the way, we love UX, not UI.

acchow 5y ago

Because Go doesn't support userland generic types, I see liberal use of `interface{}` types in APIs. There must be a better way.

eko 5y ago
Generics are coming in next version, go 1.18 in around 6 months ;)
- elementi 5y ago
  That would be such great! I'm pretty new with Golang, where could I keep myself updated with the latest news?
  - henvic 5y ago
    I'd say keeping an eye in the issue tracker https://golang.org/issues https://golang.org/issues + golang-nuts mailing list https://groups.google.com/g/golang-nuts?pli=1 https://groups.google.com/g/golang-nuts?pli=1 might be a good start. I wrote an article about where to find Go-related content a while ago: https://henvic.dev/posts/go/ https://henvic.dev/posts/go/
    - elementi 5y ago
      Thanks a lot!!!
      - Abishek_Muthian 5y ago
        I recommend https://golangnews.com/ https://golangnews.com/ too, Not just because of its utility or that it has HN interface but also because Kenny Grant has been contributing to the Go ecosystem for a long time and his code is a pleasure to read.
- acchow 5y ago
  anxiously awaiting :)
qaq 5y ago
Well they will be landing pretty soon
5y ago

redisman 5y ago

Most of all, it’s simple. You can’t do fancy and clever stuff which might feel bad in the moment but 6 months from now you’ll be much happier to read the simple but slightly verbose version.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
elementi 5y ago
I agree at 2000%!
Scarbutt 5y ago
I wouldn't call Go 'slightly verbose'.
- adtac 5y ago
  Show me the least verbose way to process things in parallel in Python and I'll show you the least verbose way to do it in go: go f()

ppeetteerr 5y ago

> In Python, everything must be indented with 4 spaces. It was a great idea…. or not? I think probably it was one of the worst idea to apply in the development industry. Not even TABS! It’s literally impossible to have a consistent indentation, especially when you have more than 2 nested loops/functions/switch. Pretty sure that's not accurate. You can use whatever number of spaces, provided it's consistent for a specific block of code.

elementi 5y ago
Ups! As you might have noticed, I'm a beginner on Python but that thing was REALLY annoying. Nice to know that you can use whatever number of spaces, but... consistency is hard to keep with spaces (I'm not able :/)
- m45t3r 5y ago
  As you said before, you can use tabs. You just need to use tabs everywhere (on Python 3, on Python 2 you can pretty much mix tabs and spaces, however this is a very bad idea).
- qsort 5y ago
  I'm not a big fan of python but I use it a lot for quick stuff, and syntax is just a non-issue. Any half-decent editor will handle that for you (and yes, this includes Vim). Criticize the wonky static typing tools and I'm with you. Criticize the unpredictable performance and I'll join the choir. Criticize dependency management and I'll unleash my rage. But come on, this is just not a thing. IME even data analysts with non-cs backgrounds and very limited programming ability never see this as a problem. It's fine if you don't like it (I prefer my {s as well!) but I'll be honest: it really feels like a nitpick.
m45t3r 5y ago
Yeah, Python even support tabs. On Python 2 you could even mix tabs and spaces, but this turned out to be a very bad idea. So Python 3 enforces that the whole file uses either X number of spaces or tabs, you can use either of them.
5y ago

blondin 5y ago

go has been so far a very enjoyable and consistent language. you can come back to code you wrote several years ago and not be surprised by it. the other consistent programming language i know of is java. java code from ten years ago won't be surprising to any java programmer reading it today. programming language designers often forget how important consistency is. many languages have changed their syntax so much that we should just call them something else.

whalesalad 5y ago

Can anyone link to a project that they would consider elegant? I have never cruised through a golang project and felt that emotion.

elementi 5y ago
Is there anywhere a list of Golang projects made by developers around the world? Probably github search? Haha.
- whalesalad 5y ago
  As an outsider, I am genuinely curious to hear what golang devs feel is elegant software to use as a model or inspiration.
- fortzi 5y ago
  The commenter asked people for examples of projects that they think are elegant, no reason to be so disrespectful.

henning 5y ago

I've been paying the rent/mortgage with Python since 2013: > In Python, everything must be indented with 4 spaces no > It’s literally impossible to have a consistent indentation it's trivial > as most programmers will agree, they often make the code harder to understand when reading someone else’s work No, swapping things is easy to pattern match against once you know the language. This is even dumber than complaining about Lisp parentheses.

elementi 5y ago
Thanks for your feedback. We'll correct that thing about Python as soon as possible. However please agree with me that with an educational background of C/C++, learning Go was easier than learning Python.
- uuidgen 5y ago
  I used to be a C++ dev for 10 years. I tried to learn go after hearing about how great it is. IMO - it's a hot garbage practical joke made by googlers that became popular because it was made by googlers and then it was too late to tell its was a prank. It's a corrupt amalgam of "clever hacks" and "only one good way to do things - my way". Its concurrency is awful, and makes shooting oneselves in a foot easy. Effective go teaching you how to basically make mutex using channels is just a practical joke, right? As for C++ and libraries - Boost was and is a big one. Want HTTP? There's a full server implementation you can reuse easily https://www.boost.org/doc/libs/1_55_0/doc/html/boost_asio/examples/cpp11_examples.html https://www.boost.org/doc/libs/1_55_0/doc/html/boost_asio/ex...
  - mxschumacher 5y ago
    Go's success in the cloud native infrastructure is really impressive - the language has enjoyed widespread adoption in many large engineering orgs. Having a hard time seeing where you're coming from when you talk about a "hot garbage practical joke"
    - uuidgen 5y ago

ricardobeat 5y ago

On nodejs and dependencies, it’s kind of irrelevant but I suggest the author check the size of their .go modules folder, it’s most likely also a few GB in size.

elementi 5y ago
Can nodejs be ran as a portable binary? (Electron?)
- valbaca 5y ago
  pkg: https://github.com/vercel/pkg https://github.com/vercel/pkg

umvi 5y ago

go is indeed a pleasure to write, especially if you have vscode auto-format on save with the official go formatter. Not worrying about getting the formatting just right takes a huge cognitive load off I didn't even know I had. One minor mistake in the article: > Fortunately, Python and Go removes colons by default at the end of every expression. To quote someone, “Colons are for compilers, not for human!”. Just to clarify for non-native english speakers, a colon is ":" a semi-colon is ";"

elementi 5y ago
Ah. I meant semi-colon. Ups ^_^

aingisni_del 5y ago

This is great. I too enjoy working with Go coming from a Swift, Obj-C, Java and C# background. The problem that the latter 4 languages have is keyword bloat. For example, Swift has 23 keywords just for declarations (Source: https://docs.swift.org/swift-book/ReferenceManual/LexicalStructure.html https://docs.swift.org/swift-book/ReferenceManual/LexicalStr...) The entire Go language has 25 keywords. That's it. That includes declarations, control, errors and multithreading. Language design of the latter 4 along with this keyword bloat make for unfettered methods of writing code. Want a simple HTTP request to process JSON? You can open a Go file from the last 5+ years and expect that to look exactly the same. Try doing that in the other languages, and you will find every possible combination of the same thing. Generics has so much indirection and emphasis placed on re-usability, that readability for debugging and understanding become exponentially difficult. In fact, almost every use of generics ultimately ends in type erasure or forced casting. And let's be honest: every generic has to conform to a super generic or protocol, so it's not really as generic as you thought it was going to be. Highly opinionated, reverse compatibility and the lack of generics make Go extremely powerful for it's purpose. Type safety make for easy refactoring, and when refactoring needs to take place, your code is forced to follow the conventions laid out in idiomatic Go: https://golang.org/doc/effective_go https://golang.org/doc/effective_go

aingisni_del 5y ago
Oh, another thing. Their date formatter is hilariously easy to remember: https://pkg.go.dev/time#pkg-constants https://pkg.go.dev/time#pkg-constants "01/02 03:04:05PM '06 -0700" // The reference time, in numerical order.
- SkeuomorphicBee 5y ago
  That is a very interesting approach to the problem. It is just a shame they didn't go with the third of February 2001 for their reference date, that would have been even easier to remember.
bobthebuilders 5y ago
You do know go is adding generics right?

hsn915 5y ago

I regularly write Go code and I mostly enjoy programming in the language, but this post captures nothing important about what makes writing code in Go pleasurable. Having biultin library features is nice but is not the reason. Python also has a lot of builtin library features, but I don't enjoy working with it. Static typing matters a great deal, but Java is also statically typed yet I don't enjoy working with it. For me I think what makes Go pleasurable to write in is that it has structs with value semantics and it also has pointers, and it also has none of the recent (incorrectly labeled "modern") ideas such as enfoced null-checking or enforced error handling. I can write the code in a very direct and straight forward way. I can decide myself how much abstraction to introduce. I can decide myself which errors are worth handling and which are not. I can write functions that take complicated arguments as structs without worrying about how it will degrade performance. Because structs have value semantics, creating an instance of a struct will not trigger a heap allocation unless you return a pointer to it or let it escape the current scope via other means. This matters a lot because a lot of performance degradation in other languages comes not only from being interpreted but from the model of programming that requires lots of tiny allocation. Another thing that makes go pleasurable is that a package is well defined and you can import packages written by other people. But that's only secondary IMO. Go's performance is reasonable but it's far from C/C++ level. I think a well written server in C/C++ can outperform a go webserver by a factor of 10. That said, Go is about 40x faster than Python so that's great, and it means you can write a program in Go and run it on a single machine to get the same performance to a website written in Python and hosted on 40 web servers with an insane infrastructure and requires an entire team to manage. That said, the language also has some warts, such as lack of real typed enums that can be introspected. For example, there's currently no way to dynamically introspect an enum type and find out all the defined values/constants. You must resort to code generation. Also the lack of generics, but hopefully those will land soon (within a year from now, if nothing goes wrong). But, what the language lacks in features, it compensates for in tooling. No where else have I seen a language that makes it such a breeze to cross compile. I can write code on my macbook and compile it for linux to get a valid linux executable binary that I can then `scp` to a server and have it running right away. The compiler speed is not the greatest but it's reasonable compared to pretty much everything else out there.

5y ago

password4321 5y ago

Interesting content marketing piece for an invoice PDF generator leveraging wkhtmltopdf. I would like to hear more from people working with PDF directly in Go.

styluss 5y ago

Go is really good and fun to write until you have to care how you write it. Adding sync.Pool, limiting concurrency, these are not some of my favourite things