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Comment by pka | Hacker News Reader

> There is one thing in Go, that I haven't met anywhere else. I can really understand any codebase I stumble upon in a matter of seconds.

Care to elaborate a bit more?

I understand that when you see for(...) { b[i] = f(a[i]); } then you instinctively know that it's a loop that maps over some sequence, and so on. But let's say you have a 50-100kloc codebase with a 100 files in it. In what unique to Go way does Go help you understand the big picture/coarse architecture of such a project?

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Oh, that it doesn't.

I meant smaller parts of code, and not for loops actually. (I prefer maps, filters etc.). Things like gofmt and the simplicity (in that, small number of concepts) of the language lead to most people writing fairly idiomatic code. This way most codebases look the same and you read each other's code as it were yours.

I'm just getting into Go and have found what you said to be true. It's easy to read other people's code on GH (Java is much the same way). Compare that to something like Scala, where no ones code looks the same.

Check out sourcegraph, it's great for reading Go and Java code and has a GitHub integration.

I'd like to echo what you said. I tend to be a victim of analysis paralysis, spending hours thinking up the most clever design. Go offers far fewer alternatives so there goes the temptation. Given a smallish task, I simply sit down and grind out code, and a couple of thousand lines later I have a simple, self-contained executable that does what I wanted to do. I feel there's a kind of magic in Go's brute simplicity.

Honestly the biggest thing go has going for it is gofmt. Its one of the few things I miss when I work with other languages.

I think it may actually be the thing I miss the most. (together with implicit interfaces)

Doesn't every semi-decent IDE have an option to reformat your code? What makes gofmt so special?

That all code is written the same from the get-go, and you can readily browse it in places like github, etc.

No external choices the language dictates style. It ships with the sdk & contributors are expected to use it so there is a cultural agreement out of the box. It's a cli tool so it's immensely scriptable and easy to integrate.

My biggest problem with it is implicit interface.

I genuinely despise that about it.

Why don't you like implicit interfaces, it's the feature I love the most actually?

I like it as well although I can see there would be times when you might want to be explicit.

I understand, but why would it be the greatest issue to despise, I'm just curious.

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