Why I Write Go

Kshitij Saraogi — Wed, 14 Nov 2018 06:26:23 +0000

Originally posted: Why I Write Go

tl;dr: This is not a rant about how Go is "superior" to other languages. It's all apples and oranges and I like them both, not at the same time, ofcourse! 🍎/🍊

off-topic: When I was a little boy 👦, I used to play all day long with my legos - constructing buildings, trucks, everything that I could imagine. Chaining dominoes with my parent's music collection cassettes, solving jigsaw puzzles and playing scrabble with my cousins. Good ol' days!

Inspiration

Reading Rob Pike's post titled "Less is exponentially more", I found myself introspecting about the way I write software. The article evoked some joy in me, stimulated that deep-seated feel-good core - the part of my being that enjoys programming. And I want to share it with everyone!

Why Go?

During my GSoC, I used to struggle with grasping the idea of classes implementing behaviours and how would it be useful for subclasses - inheritance.

For example, let's consider a Point class representing a point in the Cartesian Space.

Should distance be a method on this class?
Does distance define the "behaviour" of a Point?

*Not necessarily! *

(After reading some mathematics on Measure Theory, I came to know that "distance" is a quantity defined by a "metric function" - property of the space rather than any entity.)

In our case, the distance should be a method on the CartesianSpace rather than Point.

The question that arises then is how can I assure that I can always compute distance between given pair of Point values, or any geometrical entity for that matter?
Should I just override the distance method in each geometrical class?
If so, what purpose does the base distance method in CartesianSpace serve now?

I would agree that these questions are subjective and I respect your solution to the problem.

However, then I came to know about Duck Typing in Python and it's approach to the problem. However, I was not satisfied with the Python implementation. It almost felt kind of a convenience pattern which was incompatible with Pythonic code.

Eventually, I found about Go interfaces.(Plus, CSP! ❤️)

Things I like about Go

Coming back to the question - "Why I Write Go?", here are some of my favourite reasons:

emphasis on separation between state and behaviour
composition over inheritance; think legos 🧩
simplicity in design; less is more, indeed

More importantly, I rediscovered the joy of putting tiny pieces together and building something greater than the sum of the individual parts (read off-topic). In addition to writing “cleaner and more readable” code, I find a lot more clarity when it comes to solving problems and coherence in my thinking while implementing the solution. I guess that is the underappreciated USP of Go, for me, ofcourse! 😁

So what is your favourite programming language and why? 😃

DEV Community: Kshitij Saraogi

Why I Write Go

Inspiration

Why Go?

Things I like about Go