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I'm just wondering why the author keeps making those articles about strongly disliking Go, ok we get it your favorite language is Rust, you don't like Go. Why d

by Thaxll 5y ago

I'm just wondering why the author keeps making those articles about strongly disliking Go, ok we get it your favorite language is Rust, you don't like Go. Why does the author does not move on, exactly? "Fine. It may well be that Go is not adequate for production services unless your shop is literally made up of Go experts (Tailscale) or you have infinite money to spend on engineering costs (Google)." This is really wrong on so many level especially coming from someone that has shipped what exactly in production? What is the expertise of OP to tell people to not use a language that was proven to be very successful.

etblg 5y ago
As far as I can tell he has made.......2 One of them a couple of years ago, detailing his experiences with using Go to accomplish something, contrasting it with how it would work in Rust. And then this new one, which seems like a semi-response to that previous article hitting the HN front page again. I wouldn't say he "keeps making" them, he's made two, and they're not coming out of nowhere. As he said in a comment of the most recent submission of his previous article (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31193260 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31193260): > Author here: I wrote this in 2020, have changed jobs twice since. Both jobs involved Go in some capacity, where it's supposed to shine (web services). It has not been a pleasant experience either - I've lost count of the amount of incidents directly caused by poor error handling, or Go default values. > Because that's the kind of code I inevitably end up being on-call for, and I'm tired of being woken up because of the same classes of preventable errors, all the time. It doesn't matter that I don't personally write Go anymore: it's unescapable. If it's not internal Go code, it's in a SAAS we pay for: and no matter who writes it, it fails in all the same predictable ways. It's not that it's not his favourite language, it's that he's experiencing actual day to day issues at work caused (in his opinion) by the design of the language. I think that's fair to write about.
andrelaszlo 5y ago
I thought the criticism was pretty balanced. I've seen worse articles here about other languages. Pretty used to getting this feeling about the Python articles. It's almost always about the lack of some feature that exists in other languages. It seems to be part of the cycle of a language that gets widely adopted. I think the next step is that people stop fighting over it and just accept that it has some nice features and some bad parts. Articles like this helps me (as a dev who's not using go very often) getting a feeling for what types of problem go might be good for and not. If it's well-written like this one, I think it's a good balance to the many positive articles that I've read. Clearly the author cares a lot about language design. I get that he might be coming from a different background with different tastes. The fact that he doesn't like go isn't saying your time spent learning the language has been for nothing. Clearly a lot of code is being written in it, don't worry! Here's some stuff he's done: https://fasterthanli.me/about https://fasterthanli.me/about I think he's entitled to an opinion either way though. Very interesting to see the response. Had no idea it was this touchy. I can get a bit weary seeing the millionth article saying that Python sucks because it doesn't have a feature of another language - but it also makes me want to try out that other language for myself.
naikrovek 5y ago
this article was written specifically to address the comments that came up when the two-year old article made the rounds again. that's why he didn't move on; we resurrected the topic.
bigwavedave 5y ago
> I'm just wondering why the author keeps making those articles about strongly disliking Go, ok we get it your favorite language is Rust, you don't like Go. Why does the author does not move on, exactly? He made a post two years ago in 2020 that was attacked by zealots yesterday when it hit the front page of hn and a post today that was a reply to that. It would be like if you were to post an opinion about perl two years ago, respond to people who attack you because they love perl more than their own children, and then be dismissively accused of crusading against perl when in reality all you did was post a response to people attacking you based on your two year old post. It's insane to say that two posts written two years apart is a crusade; I imagine most people who flagged the article and downvote its defenders simply can't accept legitimate criticisms of something they love too much to admit it has any flaws. So, I'll ask you your own question: "Why don't you move on, exactly?"

by Thaxll 5y ago

etblg 5y ago

As far as I can tell he has made.......2 One of them a couple of years ago, detailing his experiences with using Go to accomplish something, contrasting it with how it would work in Rust. And then this new one, which seems like a semi-response to that previous article hitting the HN front page again. I wouldn't say he "keeps making" them, he's made two, and they're not coming out of nowhere. As he said in a comment of the most recent submission of his previous article (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31193260 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31193260): > Author here: I wrote this in 2020, have changed jobs twice since. Both jobs involved Go in some capacity, where it's supposed to shine (web services). It has not been a pleasant experience either - I've lost count of the amount of incidents directly caused by poor error handling, or Go default values. > Because that's the kind of code I inevitably end up being on-call for, and I'm tired of being woken up because of the same classes of preventable errors, all the time. It doesn't matter that I don't personally write Go anymore: it's unescapable. If it's not internal Go code, it's in a SAAS we pay for: and no matter who writes it, it fails in all the same predictable ways. It's not that it's not his favourite language, it's that he's experiencing actual day to day issues at work caused (in his opinion) by the design of the language. I think that's fair to write about.

andrelaszlo 5y ago

I thought the criticism was pretty balanced. I've seen worse articles here about other languages. Pretty used to getting this feeling about the Python articles. It's almost always about the lack of some feature that exists in other languages. It seems to be part of the cycle of a language that gets widely adopted. I think the next step is that people stop fighting over it and just accept that it has some nice features and some bad parts. Articles like this helps me (as a dev who's not using go very often) getting a feeling for what types of problem go might be good for and not. If it's well-written like this one, I think it's a good balance to the many positive articles that I've read. Clearly the author cares a lot about language design. I get that he might be coming from a different background with different tastes. The fact that he doesn't like go isn't saying your time spent learning the language has been for nothing. Clearly a lot of code is being written in it, don't worry! Here's some stuff he's done: https://fasterthanli.me/about https://fasterthanli.me/about I think he's entitled to an opinion either way though. Very interesting to see the response. Had no idea it was this touchy. I can get a bit weary seeing the millionth article saying that Python sucks because it doesn't have a feature of another language - but it also makes me want to try out that other language for myself.

naikrovek 5y ago

this article was written specifically to address the comments that came up when the two-year old article made the rounds again. that's why he didn't move on; we resurrected the topic.

bigwavedave 5y ago

> I'm just wondering why the author keeps making those articles about strongly disliking Go, ok we get it your favorite language is Rust, you don't like Go. Why does the author does not move on, exactly? He made a post two years ago in 2020 that was attacked by zealots yesterday when it hit the front page of hn and a post today that was a reply to that. It would be like if you were to post an opinion about perl two years ago, respond to people who attack you because they love perl more than their own children, and then be dismissively accused of crusading against perl when in reality all you did was post a response to people attacking you based on your two year old post. It's insane to say that two posts written two years apart is a crusade; I imagine most people who flagged the article and downvote its defenders simply can't accept legitimate criticisms of something they love too much to admit it has any flaws. So, I'll ask you your own question: "Why don't you move on, exactly?"