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> Note that there definitely are PL communities that generally can't handle any criticism irrespective of civility, but the Go community isn't among them. Indee

• jhoechtl 5y ago
  Well put and I agree with most points but > Go is not a fun language to program in Not having to think about how something should be done in the most elegant way, instead focus on the problem at hand is a lot of "fun"
  • throwaway894345 5y ago
    Agreed. This was the only nit I was inclined to pick as well. I have a lot of fun writing Go, because it gets out of my way.
    • afdbcreid 5y ago
      But programming languages should get on your way while you're doing things wrong. Go does not. To be fare, most mainstream languages do not: I think Rust is the best in this thing, other languages often aren't. But Go is by far the worst of all, because of its striving for "simplicity".
      • throwaway894345 5y ago
        > But programming languages should get on your way while you're doing things wrong. Go does not. To be fare, most mainstream languages do not: I think Rust is the best in this thing, other languages often aren't. But Go is by far the worst of all, because of its striving for "simplicity". Go typically does get in your way when you're doing things wrong, but yes, I'd like to see Go require return values be dealt with or explicitly ignored. That said, there are linters for this, but in practice it's never been a material problem for me so I haven't bothered to wire one into my project. Over time, I've learned not to be so concerned about issues which are mostly just theoretical--there are enough practical problems to deal with first.
        • yencabulator 5y ago
          > I'd like to see Go require return values be dealt with or explicitly ignored. Ever use the return value from fmt.Println?
          • throwaway894345 5y ago
            Not usually, but the correct answer would be to either explicitly ignore the unused return values or use APIs that don't return values you don't care about.
            • preseinger 5y ago
              _ = fmt.Println("ok") // 1 fmt.Println("ok") // 2 1 is unambiguously worse than 2.
    • reedjosh 5y ago
      I just can't stand taking three lines to unpack a value from a map or to return if error. Why can't I just say `return if err := somefunc(); err != nil` It's mega frustrating on top of the lack of generics and other abstractions. And now that generics are coming about, I'm sure it will take forever until my current project can use them. My current project is in the k8s ecosystem which due to the lack of generics, implemented its own clever but awful type system.
      • preseinger 5y ago
        The problem here is that you think "error handling" is somehow different, and probably less important, than normal logic in your codebase. But Go asserts that the "sad path" is just as important as the "happy path".
      • throwaway894345 5y ago
        I can't relate. Newline characters have never been burdensome to me, and they aid in visual structure (the control flow is represented by the visual structure of the program, not only for "good data" paths, but also for error paths). My programming problems are usually not related to localized keystroke boilerplate, but rather larger issues of abstraction and data modeling. > My current project is in the k8s ecosystem which due to the lack of generics, implemented its own clever but awful type system. The k8s ecosystem's type system is unrelated to generics. It has a concept of user-defined resource types, which means that users can provide an OpenAPI document describing their resource type which Kubernetes will then use to validate new user-provided resources of a given type. From the perspective of the Go compiler, these types are dynamic types--they can't be known at compile time. They aren't a candidate for generics in the host language. That said, it's often tedious to write a controller for these resource types, but that's because Kubernetes' controller frameworks are really complicated. They remind me of enterprise Java code with gratuitous abstraction. Maybe that abstraction serves some purpose, but it wasn't helping me and I ended up rewriting much of it in more standard Go (I didn't release it because it was prototype code and I didn't want to support it) and it was quite a lot simpler. I don't recall seeing many places where I felt that generics would be a significant improvement, but it's been a while.
  • xigoi 5y ago
    Having to write the same code several times with minor changes because of a lack of abstraction is a lot of fun.
    • LandR 5y ago
      I don't know how people can say go "gets out of the way". Go makes me write dozens of lines of code to do something simple that in an any modern language takes a few. It doesn't get out of the way, it gets in the way constantly. I'm constantly thinking in any modern language I can just do X, but in Go with its myriad missing features I have to sit and think about how I'm going to do it with just loops and if statements. It's the exact opposite of getting out the way, don't even get me started on the syntactic verbosity.
      • throwaway894345 5y ago
        Most programmers aren't bottlenecked by keyboard proficiency, but rather by dealing with poor tooling or gratuitously complex programs ("terse" doesn't entail "simple", and very often it's the inverse).
        • xigoi 5y ago
          That's a strawman. We're not advocating for terseness in character count (otherwise we'd be using languages like APL and Jelly), but for better abstractions. There are other benefits than character count. * Having a lot of repetitive code makes it easy to make a mistake when you edit one copy and forget about the others. * A lack of abstraction can obscure intent, making you focus on implementation details. * Having less code overall makes it easier to keep track of it in your head.
      • sangnoir 5y ago
        > Go makes me write dozens of lines of code to do something simple that in an any modern language takes a few. "Getting out of the way" doesn't mean it takes fewer keystrokes - it just means that you don't have to think about it / there are no surprises. It took me a while to grok what pythonic code is and looks like, and I feel the bar for Go is even lower. Even if you're browsing an unfamiliar codebase, code is exactly where you expect it to be, and you don't have to ponder on where to make your changes. To me, that is how a language moves out of the way; it fades into the background and you mostly concern yourself with the logic.
  • mjr00 5y ago
    True, fun is certainly different for everyone! I also enjoy being able to just focus on a real world problem, but I also programmed Scala professionally for many years, and I found it a lot more fun purely from the point of view of writing code. Writing a really elegant for comprehension or using currying in clever ways to make your code "elegant" was just enjoyable in and of itself, regardless of what problem you were actually trying to solve. Rust is pretty similar to me in that regard.
    • eweise 5y ago
      Same. I use Go for work because that's what the company uses, but I can't imagine coding in it for "fun". Elm + Scala feel much better to me.
• rhacker 5y ago
  Seems like the opposite to me. I once tried to set up and run a GRPC service (I can't remember which one) but something it depended on changed and so the codebase I was trying to run basically didn't run anymore. It was f-ing weird that (at the time?) there was no way to lock down deps - that or someone didn't care to? I don't know the language baffles me completely.
  • throwaway894345 5y ago
    There has always been some way to pin dependencies, but historically you had to opt into it via vendor directories and the like; however, as of the last ~4 years, the standard project format manages this for you (the go.mod file pins dependency versions).
• mcronce 5y ago
  > Go is a language that gets out of your way, encourages you to solve your problem Maybe I'm just too dumb for Go, but this is not consistent with my experience at all. Go's insistence on pretending that complexity doesn't exist would get in my way all the time. Go's extreme hostility toward FFI calls got in my way several times.
  • zozbot234 5y ago
    > Go's inane hostility toward FFI calls got in my way several times. All languages w/ obligate GC are "hostile" to FFI in some way or another. The Go default implementation also uses split stacks or something for its goroutines, that cannot feasibly interop with FFI code. But it's usually easy enough to just isolate Go code to it's own process/address space and use IPC or network communication to enable the interop one would usually achieve via FFI.
    • mcronce 5y ago
      Serializing a request structure, making an IPC/network call, deserializing the request structure, serializing the response structure, sending it back, and deserializing it ... isn't really a solution when the purpose of an FFI call is typically to fix some performance issue. Lots of garbage-collected languages make FFI not only easy but plenty fast. Go does neither.
      • throwaway894345 5y ago
        I started out thinking that fast and easy FFI was ideal and being disappointed that Go's FFI was neither. I've since changed my opinion as it's really nice that one can usually get away without pulling any C dependencies into their dependency tree. I wrote more in the sibling comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31194347 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31194347
        • mcronce 5y ago
          That would be great if Go provided better performance. With its awful FFI, you have no recourse when you hit its limits other than to rewrite the entire codebase in something else. As with many things, there's nothing stopping you from just sticking with pure Go if you don't like C toolchains. While C build issues are a valid theoretical concern, in practice I've never had any Python package fail to install because of a C dependency problem that wasn't trivially resolved, nor any Rust project fail to compile because of a C dependency problem at all.
• vrnvu 5y ago
  I've done pet projects in Haskell, Ocaml, Racket, Rust... Now I'm learning Zig... I've worked for years with Java, Python, Javascript/Typescript... Use to work with Z3... Tried plenty of different stuff. After years my conclusion is that If I want to get a job done I'll choose Golang. Hands down the best productivity programming language nowadays. GC for memory management and productivity, explicit, easy to read, hard to mess up, good performance and efficiency. Get' the job done and really well. End. I love PL theory. Reading an Idris book an implementing some cool recursive patterns. Building a small project in different languages and compare them... Compilers, type systems and GC papers... But in my experience, the more complexity and "implicitness" a language has to offer, the easier is for "us" to go the wrong way.
  • pkulak 5y ago
    I've done all kinds of stuff too, and agree that Go is pretty good to "get things done", especially networking. But I don't know about best. Maybe ten years ago when a static binary was important, but now that everything is deployed as a container, that's off the table and things like Python or Kotlin are equally deployable, but way easier to use. Nowadays, if you _really_ need a single binary, you probably also need it to be tiny. Cramming an entire GC and runtime into the executable doesn't seem much different than building a container to me.
    • throwaway894345 5y ago
      I've been developing Python professionally for 15 years, including almost a decade of deploying to containers. I think Go is much easier to use (especially in a container environment): 1. Static types make it much easier to read and write code for even a single individual, and the benefit scales superlinearly as the contributor count and code base age increase. Go also has a ton of other tooling which just outclasses Python equivalents for both simplicity and performance (e.g., profiling tools, and even things like gofmt vs black where the former is way faster) 2. Because Python is so slow, even medium sized test suites take a long time to run. You end up having to triage your test suite to keep CI times reasonable. This just isn't a problem in Go (unless you're doing something I/O bound). 3. Python dependency management still sucks. If you want reproducibility, it takes ~30 minutes just to resolve dependencies for relatively small-but-not-toy-sized projects. This obviously kills your CI times, and there aren't great workarounds except to forego dependency management altogether. Go builds are nearly instant in most cases (assuming you have build caching enabled in CI) and still far better than Python builds in the worst cases. Python also depends a ton on C, so cross compilation is basically impossible (whereas it's trivial in Go) and simply building for any non-mainstream platform is going to entail a whole bunch of work (C projects typically make sweeping, undocumented assumptions about their build environments and targets). 4. Being able to make small artifacts is surprisingly important. When your container image is hundreds of megabytes, you feel it in your iteration loop (especially if you're in a "site down" situation and your iteration loop involves rebuilding and deploying containers to production to restore service). It also means your services can't scale up as responsively, and if a container gets bounced (and scheduled onto another node) it implies longer downtime before that container can carry load again. Similarly, rolling back from a bad deploy can be almost instantaneous if your images are small. Go has the advantage here because it can build on scratch images and because it doesn't need to ship the complete source code (native compilation prunes unreachable code, and binary machine code is considerably more compact than unicode source code). 5. If your development environment is Mac or Windows, Docker kind of sucks for Python development because you'll want to mount your source code volumes into the container, but Docker for Mac/Windows runs the container in a Linux VM with a process that marshals filesystem events back and forth over the guest/host boundary consuming virtually all of the CPU allocated to the VM. In Go, you don't mount the volume at all, rather you just build the image from scratch or you rebuild the binary within the image (or outside of the image and copy it in). You can viably use something like `docker-compose build` as part of your iteration loop with Go. 6. Distributing CLIs via container images makes for a crumby end-user experience, and if you don't distribute Python via container images. Something like shiv mostly works, but there might still be dynamic dependencies that users have to include (iirc, we ran into this with graphviz and a few other libs). Go binaries Just Work. > Cramming an entire GC and runtime into the executable doesn't seem much different than building a container to me. A Go runtime (which includes the GC) is just a couple of megabytes. Slim python base images are 60mb compressed.
• weatherlite 5y ago
  > Go is a language that gets out of your way, encourages you to solve your problem Haven't experienced this yet but I'm a Go noob. I think everything looks easy when you mastered it, I don't think Go is so much easier than JS/Python or even C. Might be easier than Java but Java has so much more community support (e.g Stackoverflow answers) it easily evens out.
  • throwaway894345 5y ago
    I started playing with Go in 2012 when I was doing professional C, C#, C++, Java, and Python. I stuck with it because almost everything was surprisingly easy. For example, I didn't have to learn an obscure DSL just to include dependencies! I didn't have to figure out how to wire together a "test target" in that DSL or evaluate a dozen test frameworks to get unit tests running! I could build and deploy a high-performance HTTP server with a single binary (no external apache/uwsgi/etc web server process)! And often without any third party dependencies at all! And idiomatic code ran 100x faster than Python, and on top of that there was headroom for minor optimizations (pulling allocations out of tight loops, basically). After a bit of experience, it as even easier than Python or JS thanks to static types. > Might be easier than Java but Java has so much more community support (e.g Stackoverflow answers) it easily evens out. This was true in the early days, but now Go is extensively covered in Stack Overflow. Of course, there aren't as many Go posts on SO as there are Java posts, but that's because Go is considerably simpler--there's less information to cover.
• Ar-Curunir 5y ago
  This just sounds like the same arguments that have been made for C for ages. The complexity of programming is pushed out from the language into the program, the tools, and the programmer’s head. It’s not often that that’s a worthwhile trade-off