Why I Write Go

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! 🍎/🍊

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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!

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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.

1. Should distance be a method on this class?
2. 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? 😃