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I am only a beginner in Go, but what I have done so far, I have loved. It's a great alternative to your typical scripting languages like PHP, Perl, Python, Ruby

I am only a beginner in Go, but what I have done so far, I have loved. It's a great alternative to your typical scripting languages like PHP, Perl, Python, Ruby, Node, etc, etc, etc... And simpler and funner to use than C/C++ IMO. I really hope it keeps gaining momentum.

dmak 13y ago
Could you go into detail on your experiences for Go compared to JS or Ruby?
- miloshadzic 13y ago
  I know Ruby and some Go and never really understood why people compare them so much. Very different languages.
  - enneff 13y ago
    I think it's because people use them for similar things. I have met many developers that have rewritten Ruby web services in Go (with good results).
  - nXqd 13y ago
    +1
  - jacques_chester 13y ago
    On HN there's a lot of people who went from writing Ruby to writing Go. If all you have are a hammer and a screwdriver, everything looks like a blog post comparing the two tools you've tried.
- aaronblohowiak 13y ago
  Takes me about 10-20% longer to do trivial things in go than ruby, but the results are much faster and bigger refactorings are also much faster to complete (nice type system). The ability to really max your perf out in short amount of time is also delightful
  - donutdan4114 13y ago
    Yea everything takes me longer to make, but you end up with a better, faster application.
  - sillysaurus2 13y ago
    My experience with Go was bizarre -- I loved programming in it, but I don't understand why! For example, Go has no REPL. (It's difficult for statically-typed languages to provide one.) It's commonly believed that a REPL is valuable and increases productivity. So if you were offered the choice, is there any circumstance in which "no REPL" is equally powerful as having one? Well, the vast majority of great hackers seem to agree that it's always superior to have a REPL than to be forced to live without. Lots of people love programming in Golang (I especially love to write distributed systems with it!) yet it probably won't ever offer us a REPL. That must mean one of two possibilities are true, both of which are bizarre: either 1) we love Go in spite of being limited by not having a REPL, or 2) having a REPL isn't as big of a deal as everyone thought. So I'd like to ask all of you: Do we love Go in spite of being held back by it? If so, then what are the factors that cause us to decide that using Go is worth giving up programming power? After all, each of us are choosing to use Go in lieu of more powerful languages. So why do we choose to give up programming power? Or do you believe in the other possibility: having a REPL doesn't matter as much as everyone thought? That seems plausible. It's at least as plausible as "it's a good idea to give up REPLs for static typing." Go is wonderful to work with. But I'm so confused why it feels wonderful to me. I know I love programming in it, but once I start thinking about the implications, I start to wonder: Isn't giving up power a bad thing, and therefore choosing to use Go == choosing to be forever held back by its deficits, and therefore it's a bad decision? Or is it true that having every possible language feature available to you ("maximum potential programming power," i.e. as far above Blub as possible) isn't as big a deal as we all thought? This pg essay talks about why it's worthwhile to have as much power as possible: http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html (search for Blub Paradox) .... So either he's wrong, or we're ignoring him even though he's right. Which is it? EDIT: There are other limitations besides lacking a REPL, e.g. there's no dynamic typing. It seems like we should try to figure out why it's a good idea to give up any programming power at all.
pstuart 13y ago
It will - it's too compelling a proposition.
- pjmlp 13y ago
  I doubt it will ever make a dent on the enterprise over the JVM/.NET/C++ stacks, unless a compelling library requiring its use shows up.
  - JulianMorrison 13y ago
    It will tend to make a dent one program at a time - like etcd, docker, nsq. Soon, a significant fraction of your installables will have to be compiled with Go. This was reason enough for C to get popular.
    - pjmlp 13y ago
      > It will tend to make a dent one program at a time - like etcd, docker, nsq. Soon, a significant fraction of your installables will have to be compiled with Go. Only if commercial UNIX and Windows also get rewritten in Go. > This was reason enough for C to get popular. C got popular because UNIX was adopted by the enterprise and C was the system language. I doubt C would ever been popular without UNIX.
      - thinkpad20 13y ago
        I might be off, but I think C still would have been popular. It's such a simple language, very easy to learn, easy to reason about, close to the machine but provides enough abstraction to easily write complicated code. C's merits as a language are self-evident beyond its usage in Unix. Of course, some other language with this set of properties might have taken C's role if it had not been for unix, so maybe that's what you meant.
        59nadir 13y ago
        > It's such a simple language, very easy to learn... Mhm. > ... easy to reason about... So very much no. There is nothing about the stateful nature of C-programming, its syntax or the patterns people use that is easy to reason about. You're comparing it to what, exactly? C++? C is an amazing language but comparing it to the languages that were around when it became popular it's not even close to relatively easy to reason about. Even less so nowadays. > provides enough abstraction to easily write complicated code This strikes me as a weird thing to list in "pros". Complicated is the opposite of good. Abstractions should let you write simple code, not complicated code. I feel like you've either misunderstood the word "complicated", massively mischaracterized C or you have a very weird view on abstraction. > Of course, some other language with this set of properties might have taken C's role if it had not been for unix, so maybe that's what you meant. I'd like to point out that your assumption that people use programming languages because they are better than the alternatives is pretty naive. The most popular languages are decent, no doubt, but have you noticed how every really good language suffers from a pretty huge lack of users? We all know these languages are better, but it's never been an issue of "You're not good enough for people to use you". If there was ever any indicator for a good language it'd be "What do people choose when they have the freedom, knowledge and opportunity to choose anything without any outside influence?". That scenario is so wildly scarce to observe and anyone who is in that situation likely suffers from biases acquired earlier on his programming journey.

dmak 13y ago

Could you go into detail on your experiences for Go compared to JS or Ruby?

miloshadzic 13y ago
I know Ruby and some Go and never really understood why people compare them so much. Very different languages.
- enneff 13y ago
  I think it's because people use them for similar things. I have met many developers that have rewritten Ruby web services in Go (with good results).
- nXqd 13y ago
  +1
- jacques_chester 13y ago
  On HN there's a lot of people who went from writing Ruby to writing Go. If all you have are a hammer and a screwdriver, everything looks like a blog post comparing the two tools you've tried.
aaronblohowiak 13y ago
Takes me about 10-20% longer to do trivial things in go than ruby, but the results are much faster and bigger refactorings are also much faster to complete (nice type system). The ability to really max your perf out in short amount of time is also delightful
- donutdan4114 13y ago
  Yea everything takes me longer to make, but you end up with a better, faster application.
- sillysaurus2 13y ago
  My experience with Go was bizarre -- I loved programming in it, but I don't understand why! For example, Go has no REPL. (It's difficult for statically-typed languages to provide one.) It's commonly believed that a REPL is valuable and increases productivity. So if you were offered the choice, is there any circumstance in which "no REPL" is equally powerful as having one? Well, the vast majority of great hackers seem to agree that it's always superior to have a REPL than to be forced to live without. Lots of people love programming in Golang (I especially love to write distributed systems with it!) yet it probably won't ever offer us a REPL. That must mean one of two possibilities are true, both of which are bizarre: either 1) we love Go in spite of being limited by not having a REPL, or 2) having a REPL isn't as big of a deal as everyone thought. So I'd like to ask all of you: Do we love Go in spite of being held back by it? If so, then what are the factors that cause us to decide that using Go is worth giving up programming power? After all, each of us are choosing to use Go in lieu of more powerful languages. So why do we choose to give up programming power? Or do you believe in the other possibility: having a REPL doesn't matter as much as everyone thought? That seems plausible. It's at least as plausible as "it's a good idea to give up REPLs for static typing." Go is wonderful to work with. But I'm so confused why it feels wonderful to me. I know I love programming in it, but once I start thinking about the implications, I start to wonder: Isn't giving up power a bad thing, and therefore choosing to use Go == choosing to be forever held back by its deficits, and therefore it's a bad decision? Or is it true that having every possible language feature available to you ("maximum potential programming power," i.e. as far above Blub as possible) isn't as big a deal as we all thought? This pg essay talks about why it's worthwhile to have as much power as possible: http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html (search for Blub Paradox) .... So either he's wrong, or we're ignoring him even though he's right. Which is it? EDIT: There are other limitations besides lacking a REPL, e.g. there's no dynamic typing. It seems like we should try to figure out why it's a good idea to give up any programming power at all.

pstuart 13y ago

It will - it's too compelling a proposition.

pjmlp 13y ago
I doubt it will ever make a dent on the enterprise over the JVM/.NET/C++ stacks, unless a compelling library requiring its use shows up.
- JulianMorrison 13y ago
  It will tend to make a dent one program at a time - like etcd, docker, nsq. Soon, a significant fraction of your installables will have to be compiled with Go. This was reason enough for C to get popular.
  - pjmlp 13y ago
    > It will tend to make a dent one program at a time - like etcd, docker, nsq. Soon, a significant fraction of your installables will have to be compiled with Go. Only if commercial UNIX and Windows also get rewritten in Go. > This was reason enough for C to get popular. C got popular because UNIX was adopted by the enterprise and C was the system language. I doubt C would ever been popular without UNIX.
    - thinkpad20 13y ago
      I might be off, but I think C still would have been popular. It's such a simple language, very easy to learn, easy to reason about, close to the machine but provides enough abstraction to easily write complicated code. C's merits as a language are self-evident beyond its usage in Unix. Of course, some other language with this set of properties might have taken C's role if it had not been for unix, so maybe that's what you meant.
      - 59nadir 13y ago
        > It's such a simple language, very easy to learn... Mhm. > ... easy to reason about... So very much no. There is nothing about the stateful nature of C-programming, its syntax or the patterns people use that is easy to reason about. You're comparing it to what, exactly? C++? C is an amazing language but comparing it to the languages that were around when it became popular it's not even close to relatively easy to reason about. Even less so nowadays. > provides enough abstraction to easily write complicated code This strikes me as a weird thing to list in "pros". Complicated is the opposite of good. Abstractions should let you write simple code, not complicated code. I feel like you've either misunderstood the word "complicated", massively mischaracterized C or you have a very weird view on abstraction. > Of course, some other language with this set of properties might have taken C's role if it had not been for unix, so maybe that's what you meant. I'd like to point out that your assumption that people use programming languages because they are better than the alternatives is pretty naive. The most popular languages are decent, no doubt, but have you noticed how every really good language suffers from a pretty huge lack of users? We all know these languages are better, but it's never been an issue of "You're not good enough for people to use you". If there was ever any indicator for a good language it'd be "What do people choose when they have the freedom, knowledge and opportunity to choose anything without any outside influence?". That scenario is so wildly scarce to observe and anyone who is in that situation likely suffers from biases acquired earlier on his programming journey.