Comment by chenglou | Hacker News Reader

Comment by chenglou | Hacker News Reader

Hey trishume! It’s been a while (this is the Reason person).

Great post; it echoes all the experiences I/we’ve personally had, especially the alternative Rust section: on the spectrum of how much intelligence one needs to understand fancy abstractions, all of us programmers, good and bad, are pretty much lumped to the lower end. I’ve seen plenty of skilled folks “decompensate” their expertise by reaching for overly complex abstractions. The definition of a “strong” programmer, as per the post and usually in real world, should probably be rectified to include not only “the person knows how to use this abstraction”, but also “the person knows when to stop”.

In the same vein of idea, it’d be interesting to know how Go would fare in this project. Go’s philosophy is pretty much the opposite of a language that’s usually used for compiler research; but I’ve seen indicators that using it could be surprisingly effective (and in light of this post, maybe less surprising).

More importantly, it’d be nice to know the perf characteristics of each project =)

> In the same vein of idea, it’d be interesting to know how Go would fare in this project.

I would say a bit worse than the mentioned alternatives, which all have better type systems and thereby e.g. make it easier represent and manipulate the trees that are everywhere in compilers. But most likely it's still fine, and the line count metric would be more influenced by the fact how experienced the author is than the language.

Things will get worse in Go if one wants not write a lexer/parser manually but use tooling for that. Parser combinators and other tools benefit a lot from generics.

On the other hand e.g. writing a network server with decent performance will be in Go a lot easier and more straightforward than in any of the other mentioned languages. While all those languages are general purpose programming languages they definitely have their strengths in different areas. Some are better for some tasks (e.g. compilers), other are better for others.

I’m familiar with these positions (static types, ADT, parsing, etc). But my comment on “less surprising” was meant for Python; it turned out that you can get pretty far with it with no static types nor ADT. So it’s very possible that Go can fare not too badly. The reason why I wondered about Go is because I’ve seen several HN posts about using Go for writing parsers/compilers with surprisingly ok result.

(I don’t advocate dropping static types or ADT; just that in the spirit of this blog post, it might be worthwhile to examining our assumptions.)

I've written a Pratt (TDOP) parser in Go and I thought it was a great experience. Only thing I wished was done for me by the language was that it would tell me the byte position of the cursor in a file stream.

I expect Go would end up like C++ without header files or OCaml without sum types and pattern matching, falling somewhere in between them. Although if errors are handled properly instead of by panic then it might really hurt in the line count from all the `if err != nil { return; }`

Also I commented somewhere else in this thread re perf comparison. Short answer is that since there's no incentive towards performance the signal would be swamped by differences in how much people avoid O(n^2) algorithms even if you don't need to.

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