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I can totally agree that Go is good enough for most projects, to the extent it's a go-to choice for many. However, it's not always the best tool - frequently it

I can totally agree that Go is good enough for most projects, to the extent it's a go-to choice for many. However, it's not always the best tool - frequently it wins just because it allows to prototype quicker. YMMV, but for me, it's not a love relationship, it's a love-hate relationship. > The language is extremely simple. Simplicity is a double-edged sword. It didn't even have basic generics for a long while, and it's painful to remember how bad it was without them. Still doesn't have a lot of stuff anyone would expect from a modern language. > If you know 20% of C you are already a Go expert. Strong disagree. Knowing $language means knowing the patterns and caveats and (sorry for a cliche term, I'm not fond of it, but I don't have a better term so I hope you get the meaning) "best practices". Those are drastically different between C and Go. Especially when it comes to concurrency and parallelism. > The toolchain and the core libraries alone can do 90% of what most people will ever need. This is provably false. Virtually every serious project out there pulls a ton of dependencies, like database drivers, configuration toolkits, tracing and logging libraries and so on. Heck, I think a lot of shops have project templates for this reason - to standardize on the layout and pull the company-preferred set of libraries for common stuff. Core libraries are slowly getting there but so far they don't have very basic stuff like MapSet[T] or JSON codecs for nullable types like sql.NullString, so you gotta pull third-party stuff.

AnimalMuppet 2y ago
"Good enough" plus "I already know it" almost always beats the perfect tool that I don't already know.
- sanderjd 2y ago
  There is obviously truth in this, but I think it is more often the case than many people think it is that it is more efficient to learn the better tool "good enough" than to use the worse "I already know it" tool. For instance, I've seen lots of people not want to learn sql and instead write complicated imperative implementations of relational primitives in the "I already know it" programming languages that are clearly "good enough" (because they are turing complete after all). But sql is usually a much better way to do this, and isn't hard to learn "good enough" to do most things.
  - AnimalMuppet 2y ago
    Well, there's a balance. I'm not saying "never learn anything new, assembly's good enough and I know how to use it". Learn newer and better tools. At the same time, don't learn every newer and better tool. There are too many. You don't have enough time, even if you never do anything but learn. SQL is enough better to be worth learning. The web framework of the week? Not so much. And what's "worth learning" depends on what you're trying to do. For a home project, I'll use what I know, unless the goal of the project is "learn how to use X". For work, the question is whether it brings enough to the table to be worth the learning time. Sometimes it is; often it isn't.
    - sanderjd 2y ago
      Yeah what I'd say is: Seek out and be open to advice. There's a "don't know what you don't know" problem here, as always. But this is also part of the point of reading sites like HN! People here are saying "actually there are tools that are net positive to learn a bit because they are much better choices for particular niches". That is advice! It's fine and all to say "nah, I'm good", but in many cases that's doing yourself a disservice. I really do see people writing tedious for loops in go because it is what they're comfortable with, when they would be much better served writing sql and using a language with dataframes. Most of the time people aren't just on a kick about selling some hot new thing (and I'm old enough that go was the hot new thing for me at one point!), they actually have relevant experience and are giving useful advice.

AnimalMuppet 2y ago

"Good enough" plus "I already know it" almost always beats the perfect tool that I don't already know.

sanderjd 2y ago
There is obviously truth in this, but I think it is more often the case than many people think it is that it is more efficient to learn the better tool "good enough" than to use the worse "I already know it" tool. For instance, I've seen lots of people not want to learn sql and instead write complicated imperative implementations of relational primitives in the "I already know it" programming languages that are clearly "good enough" (because they are turing complete after all). But sql is usually a much better way to do this, and isn't hard to learn "good enough" to do most things.
- AnimalMuppet 2y ago
  Well, there's a balance. I'm not saying "never learn anything new, assembly's good enough and I know how to use it". Learn newer and better tools. At the same time, don't learn every newer and better tool. There are too many. You don't have enough time, even if you never do anything but learn. SQL is enough better to be worth learning. The web framework of the week? Not so much. And what's "worth learning" depends on what you're trying to do. For a home project, I'll use what I know, unless the goal of the project is "learn how to use X". For work, the question is whether it brings enough to the table to be worth the learning time. Sometimes it is; often it isn't.
  - sanderjd 2y ago
    Yeah what I'd say is: Seek out and be open to advice. There's a "don't know what you don't know" problem here, as always. But this is also part of the point of reading sites like HN! People here are saying "actually there are tools that are net positive to learn a bit because they are much better choices for particular niches". That is advice! It's fine and all to say "nah, I'm good", but in many cases that's doing yourself a disservice. I really do see people writing tedious for loops in go because it is what they're comfortable with, when they would be much better served writing sql and using a language with dataframes. Most of the time people aren't just on a kick about selling some hot new thing (and I'm old enough that go was the hot new thing for me at one point!), they actually have relevant experience and are giving useful advice.