Part of a new series! Feel welcome to dip in and weigh in on a past question.
Let's say I've never used Golang before. Can anyone give the run down of what the language does and why you prefer it? Feel free to touch on drawbacks as well.
Ben Halpern
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Pitch me on Go
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Discussion (46)
Pro
Cons
Coming from scala, clojure, elixir viewpoint, the golang ecosystem is huge and many vendors provide bindings. From a python, node view, golang feels a little smaller.
Man, u've bee sleeping in dough; niche background
"Sleeping in dough" never heard that idiom before. Language of origin?
I have worked in scala and haskell. I haven't used elixir or clojure at work. I used the expression "coming from" to refer to the general perspective of those communities.
Sorry, that means earning some good money
First time I've seen that as a euphemism for procedural.
Go FAQ: Why build concurrency on the ideas of CSP?:
"Experience with several earlier languages has shown that the CSP model fits well into a procedural language framework.".
It's a procedural language with a built in coordination model (for something functional you have go with something like Erlang or Elixir).
Haha yup exactly. It's definitely a euphemism.
What's the basis for learning Go in a day?
I like pointing people who already know programming to "Effective Go". If you have no experience with concurrency and threading, that will take some additional learning. Don't go in there just YOLOing channels and goroutines left and right.
My rules for goroutines:
Run(ctx *context.Context, args...) errorBased on my own experience, as an experienced developer. It is a very simple language. The go playground is a great way to learn. Only the currency model is different than most languages.
While I agree with the overall statement, Go also has a fair few foot guns because the main priority of the Go team has always been keeping the language implementation simple (see New Jersey style), even if that sometimes comes at the cost of simplicity of usage.
"It must be familiar, roughly C-like. Programmers working at Google are early in their careers and are most familiar with procedural languages, particularly from the C family. The need to get programmers productive quickly in a new language means that the language cannot be too radical."
Go at Google: Language Design in the Service of Software Engineering
In Rich Hickey's terms it tends more towards easy (familiar) rather than simple.
True.
Go being learnable in a day is a huge misconception about the language. Basic syntax yes, but it takes months to figure out proper package- and project structures.
Why so long?
The language is very opinionated on how to implement things - for example, reading a file or running a web server. There's only one way to do this in Go.
But Go is very un-opionionated when it comes to your code layout and project structure: There is no "default structure", you can create packages as you want, you create files as you want, you can place multiple types and functions within a single file, you can define interfaces inside the package that uses the interface or inside the package that provides the concrete implementation of the interface...
It just takes a time to figure out how to properly structure the code. Go is very liberal in this concern and each project should use a structure that fits best.
Why is it unopinionated on how to organize types and functions within modules?
In other languages, say, Java, you'd create a file
Order.javafor yourOrderclass. There's no such convention in Go. You can create a file calledorder.gocontaining anOrdertype, but other types, constants and functions may also be in that file. Go simply doesn't have any restrictions regarding the code structure, and that allows for the best-fitting solution for your use case on the one side but also many possibilities each with their own pros and cons on the other side.Thanks.
I was more curious about why the leadership is opinionated about error handling, but isn't as opinionated about module conventions.
I understand that in both functional and procedure languages, there is a much larger degree of freedom in how you group together items inside of modules. I haven't done a lot of c programming, but I assume it has very well established patterns for organizing modules by now.
I meant language basics. Of course everything else takes much longer. I should've clarified. Just saying it is fairly simple.
There are very few libraries for ML and AI... So Python/Scala/C++ and maybe Julia are the most usable for now.
Super fast pr reviews because there are very few choices to make. I don't love go, but that seems like it's strongest selling point relative to scala. It kind of reminds me of the goals of "basic English".
It's Stockholm Syndrome as a (micro-)service meets the Plan 9 Cinematic Universe.
Of all the languages I regularly use Go is probably the one I'm least excited about. That's exactly why I use it when I do. It's good at some very specific things (networked services, CLI tools), pretty easy to pick up, hard to forget and has decent tooling. Static binaries (with optionally embedded assets) and easy cross-compilation are nice too.
In brief, GO is a blazingly fast, statically typed programming language that outperforms so many damn dynamically typed languages.
FYI: There is a go version of docker-compose called compose v2. Worth a try. You will never regret that.
Most if not all languages can be used to be build distributed microservices. With it's focus on package oriented design and concurrency primitives, Go was actually made to build distributed systems. Given how much companies need to scale, it makes Go an excellent tool in their arsenal.
Go also has made the brave decision to remove powerful abstractions like inheritance, function overloading, etc. These may be nice, but they can often bite us in the ass later, and I don't think any developer is trustworthy enough to not to abuse them, especially when they're on a deadline and it's a Friday afternoon.
I think Go is amazing for problems dealing with I/O and where a long term solution is needed.
It may not be the best option for something where you need to be as memory efficient as possible.
Also, as much as I dislike NodeJS, I'd use it over Go for prototyping. An opinionated, statically typed language isn't great for throwing together a disposable prototype.
Just look at the mascot.
Pros:
Cons:
well that's easy: Look at the motto "Go will make you love programming again, we promise"
I was easily lost after the burnouts with 7-8 different+bloated languages and hostile communities. If you don't follow CoC of Go, you are not counted as a Go developer. The community and fhe founders of the language made a huge difference and a fresh start in my whole life.
Uh, no one mentioned the real reason to use Go :
Easy to deploy!
1) build 2) give user Executable (single file).
This. Easy cross compile and easy to deploy.
go runis on par with JIT-ed scripting language like Javascript (node/deno) or PythonWARNING: I'm super biased , Go is my favorite language.
PRO:
CON:
NOTES:
("1 astrix") reasonably ... somethings take getting used to
("2 astrix") if your environment is setup properly , also , it takes some getting used to
Probably my favorite thing about Go is that it's lacking features. While just about every other language is competing for feature parity with other languages, Go seems to be true to keeping to its original philosophy of simplicity over a bunch of features. This makes for code that is generally quite readable and understandable by others because there aren't ten thousand ways to do every thing.
Easy! The Gopher logo is super cute!
It's very productive language with very powerful concurrency. I also released my course on it recently!
Learn Go: The complete course
Karan Pratap Singh γ» May 4 γ» 72 min read
They've FINALLY added generics ... :)
Is Rust gonna be Γ°e next in your series? :ΓΎ
Pitch me on a functional programming language like Haskell or Clojure for the next time! I've never tried functional programming so it could be a nice starting point :)
There is a typo, Ben. You mean GO not TypeScript. I would drop my pitch soon.
Assuming you heard about the most infamous Bill Gates or someone else's words: "I always choose a lazy person to do a hard job, because a lazy person will find an easy way to do it." I am now pretty convinced that even leaders are lazy people too, most likely would be classified as "Lazy Leadership", but in a good way, do you know what I mean? But, It could be a strong indicator of high intelligence as the independent shows.
Fixed, thanks!
I am going to cite this image in my upcoming research as an inevitable proof of the evolution theory.
Yo! what is this community all about? It appeals to me like a mere Reddit page. It made me chuckle as I looked it up. Hahahaha.
A fun test ground π