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One day is not enough to even get a superficial understanding of any language. People tend to always exaggerate how little time it takes to learn a language to

by bborud 3y ago

One day is not enough to even get a superficial understanding of any language. People tend to always exaggerate how little time it takes to learn a language to a meaningful degree. Sure, the first day I tried Go I was able to accomplish something useful, but it took me a few months to develop a basic understanding of how you use Go in an idiomatic manner. I'd say it took at least a couple of years before I could say I "knew" Go. And it wasn't exactly love at first sight. My initial impression of Go was that it was a bit too much like C, and, coming from Java, I was a bit confused about how you structure things. That takes time to figure out for any language. What sold me on Go eventually was that for my uses (writing multi-protocol server applications that run on multiple architectures), it resulted in code that was very readable and productivity more than doubled because Go is a lot less fussy to work in than Java. Both in terms of encouraging more minimal designs and having a lot less fragility.

Cthulhu_ 3y ago
I disagree; you can learn 90% of Go in an afternoon. However, you also do have a point; the power of Go is not apparent in an afternoon, but in longer term and larger projects spanning years or decades, and hundreds or thousands of developers. It was made by and for Google to solve Google's problems, which include millions of LOC written and read by thousands of engineers over the span of decades. So while at first you think "eww, err != nil everywhere", at least in a decade of reading your own or someone elses' code you'll know exactly what's going on. How many languages are similar? I feel like a lot of languages in the past decade have had a steady migration in things like error handling, so 10 year old Java code is incomparable to today's Java. Whether that's a good thing (the language has evolved and is now more ergonomic) or a bad thing (I no longer know what's going on here) is the big debate.
- bborud 3y ago
  > I disagree; you can learn 90% of Go in an afternoon. Learning a language only starts with knowing the formal spec. Then you have to learn how to express yourself efficiently and in mechanical sympathy with the language. That takes time. Worse yet, a significant portion of developers can't do it without a lot of help.

by bborud 3y ago

Cthulhu_ 3y ago

I disagree; you can learn 90% of Go in an afternoon. However, you also do have a point; the power of Go is not apparent in an afternoon, but in longer term and larger projects spanning years or decades, and hundreds or thousands of developers. It was made by and for Google to solve Google's problems, which include millions of LOC written and read by thousands of engineers over the span of decades. So while at first you think "eww, err != nil everywhere", at least in a decade of reading your own or someone elses' code you'll know exactly what's going on. How many languages are similar? I feel like a lot of languages in the past decade have had a steady migration in things like error handling, so 10 year old Java code is incomparable to today's Java. Whether that's a good thing (the language has evolved and is now more ergonomic) or a bad thing (I no longer know what's going on here) is the big debate.

bborud 3y ago
> I disagree; you can learn 90% of Go in an afternoon. Learning a language only starts with knowing the formal spec. Then you have to learn how to express yourself efficiently and in mechanical sympathy with the language. That takes time. Worse yet, a significant portion of developers can't do it without a lot of help.