5 ms·

Articles every day? It's almost like this is a news site and Go hitting release candidate 1 is news.

by Jimmie 15y ago

_delirium 15y ago
It's fine we have articles, but I do think there's a tendency (here, as elsewhere) towards the less-subtle ones that take strong, easy to understand positions, of the "Go is great!" or "Go is crap!" variety. I think I first noticed that tendency in general, though there are doubtless lots of earlier examples, when Clay Shirky's Cognitive Surplus and Nicholas Carr's The Shallows were simultaneous best-sellers. On the question of how modern technology/networking impacts cognition, it seems the two positions that sell a lot are: "it's awesome for cognition!" and "it's horrible for cognition!"
- dhconnelly 15y ago
  I apologize if you feel my post was "Go is great!" I wrote seven double-spaced pages, and six of them were about the strengths of non-Go languages. I expected my TL;DR that I added at the top of the post would have made that point.
  - msbarnett 15y ago
    I think the "Go is great!" post was two days ago. It was a bit fluffy, but written by an enthusiastic 14 year old learning a new technology, and came from a well-meaning place. All good things. So naturally there was an enormous overreaction and an article entirely devoted to telling everyone that someone didn't want to learn something shot to the top of HN yesterday. Because people who did want to learn it had to be told that other people weren't just going to stand around and let them engage in learning without telling everyone that they wouldn't be learning that if they were you. And so, finally, today, we get the counter-counter-reaction, in which your perfectly reasonable "Go is fine and other things are fine too" post gets voted to the top as HN once again reaches an equilibrium with the idea that different people can like different things.
    - smanek 15y ago
      I'm the author of the 'Why I don't want to use Go' post you're talking about. I think you definitely should learn Go! I spent a few days using it when it first came out, and there are a lot of neat ideas that are worth learning about. I just can't think of a problem that would make me want to use it in production. FWIW, the HN title was (incorrectly) 'Why I don't want to Learn Go'. I used that title for an unpublished first draft, but s/learn/use/ before making it public. Posterous seems to still be using the old (unpublished) title as the URL (http://arantaday.com/why-i-dont-want-to-learn-go http://arantaday.com/why-i-dont-want-to-learn-go), which is probably where the submitter got the wrong idea from.
      - msbarnett 15y ago
        Solid point! I'm completely sympathetic to anyone that feels a particular tool for which there are many alternatives isn't their cup of tea. It's fine not to want to use things. I'm way less sympathetic to a reluctance to even bother learning about something, but a mis-titled HN submission is hardly your fault.
  - _delirium 15y ago
    Oh, no, this post wasn't one of them; sorry for the confusion. The "Go is great!" versus "Go is bad!" dueling posts were a day or two ago. They weren't even 100% bad either, it's just that I'm noticing that pattern of clean, uncomplicated, opposite positions pop up a lot, and I find it enticing sometimes myself. But "Why I like lots of languages, and Go is pretty neat too" is a pretty moderate position. :)
  - itsnotme 15y ago
    I apologize if you feel my post was "Go is great!" You shouldn't apologize for the feelings of others. DHowett started us in the wrong direction here with his snark (nothing else, just snark), and now none of the responses in the subthread demonstrate reading comprehension. Oh, well. It was an interesting perspective. I'd be interested in hearing from you again, after a few months of using Go as the primary language for your exploratory programming. I've been keeping a running list of things that trip me up as I plod along. So far it's mostly that initially I didn't fully grok how interfaces and types and functions work together, so I ended up working around the type system instead of enjoying it. That's slowly changing. It would be fun to compare notes.

Articles every day? It's almost like this is a news site and Go hitting release candidate 1 is news.

by Jimmie 15y ago

Articles every day? It's almost like this is a news site and Go hitting release candidate 1 is news.

It's fine we have articles, but I do think there's a tendency (here, as elsewhere) towards the less-subtle ones that take strong, easy to understand positions, of the "Go is great!" or "Go is crap!" variety. I think I first noticed that tendency in general, though there are doubtless lots of earlier examples, when Clay Shirky's Cognitive Surplus and Nicholas Carr's The Shallows were simultaneous best-sellers. On the question of how modern technology/networking impacts cognition, it seems the two positions that sell a lot are: "it's awesome for cognition!" and "it's horrible for cognition!"

dhconnelly 15y ago
I apologize if you feel my post was "Go is great!" I wrote seven double-spaced pages, and six of them were about the strengths of non-Go languages. I expected my TL;DR that I added at the top of the post would have made that point.
- msbarnett 15y ago
  I think the "Go is great!" post was two days ago. It was a bit fluffy, but written by an enthusiastic 14 year old learning a new technology, and came from a well-meaning place. All good things. So naturally there was an enormous overreaction and an article entirely devoted to telling everyone that someone didn't want to learn something shot to the top of HN yesterday. Because people who did want to learn it had to be told that other people weren't just going to stand around and let them engage in learning without telling everyone that they wouldn't be learning that if they were you. And so, finally, today, we get the counter-counter-reaction, in which your perfectly reasonable "Go is fine and other things are fine too" post gets voted to the top as HN once again reaches an equilibrium with the idea that different people can like different things.
  - smanek 15y ago
    I'm the author of the 'Why I don't want to use Go' post you're talking about. I think you definitely should learn Go! I spent a few days using it when it first came out, and there are a lot of neat ideas that are worth learning about. I just can't think of a problem that would make me want to use it in production. FWIW, the HN title was (incorrectly) 'Why I don't want to Learn Go'. I used that title for an unpublished first draft, but s/learn/use/ before making it public. Posterous seems to still be using the old (unpublished) title as the URL (http://arantaday.com/why-i-dont-want-to-learn-go http://arantaday.com/why-i-dont-want-to-learn-go), which is probably where the submitter got the wrong idea from.
    - msbarnett 15y ago
      Solid point! I'm completely sympathetic to anyone that feels a particular tool for which there are many alternatives isn't their cup of tea. It's fine not to want to use things. I'm way less sympathetic to a reluctance to even bother learning about something, but a mis-titled HN submission is hardly your fault.
- _delirium 15y ago
  Oh, no, this post wasn't one of them; sorry for the confusion. The "Go is great!" versus "Go is bad!" dueling posts were a day or two ago. They weren't even 100% bad either, it's just that I'm noticing that pattern of clean, uncomplicated, opposite positions pop up a lot, and I find it enticing sometimes myself. But "Why I like lots of languages, and Go is pretty neat too" is a pretty moderate position. :)
- itsnotme 15y ago
  I apologize if you feel my post was "Go is great!" You shouldn't apologize for the feelings of others. DHowett started us in the wrong direction here with his snark (nothing else, just snark), and now none of the responses in the subthread demonstrate reading comprehension. Oh, well. It was an interesting perspective. I'd be interested in hearing from you again, after a few months of using Go as the primary language for your exploratory programming. I've been keeping a running list of things that trip me up as I plod along. So far it's mostly that initially I didn't fully grok how interfaces and types and functions work together, so I ended up working around the type system instead of enjoying it. That's slowly changing. It would be fun to compare notes.