Hacker News Reader

Comment by stunt | Hacker News Reader

GO syntax is very regressive comparing to where we hopped programming languages should go.

I believe GO success is partly because in recent years, we have many new specialized engineers that programming isn’t their main focus (DevOps, Data Scientists, SREs) and naturally they are looking for tooling with shorter learning curve.

Also when you consider how many developers have a hard time to learn GIT after so many years, you realize why companies need something as simple as GO comparing to Rust, or Java comparing to Scala for instance.

View on HN

I hear you, but there are also upsides. As a veteran of many programming languages, I find Go's minimal feature list a plus!

Especially if I'm not rushed, I have an annoying tendency to try for the most elegant, succinct, idiomatic or general way to program a solution, and given a sufficiently expressive language I then fall victim to analysis paralysis.

By giving me so few options, Go removes a major cognitive load. Very often there's a single obvious way to get something done and I'm not tempted to try anything fancy.

I find the opposite effect to be true. In many/most cases, the type model of a piece of Go code is not at all obvious without detailed inspection.

When pretty much anything can implement any interface, and one can only tell whether an interface is fully implemented by close examination of a whole source file (rather than reading a simple implements keyword), the cognitive load is far greater.

I understand where you're coming from, and I've made many a shallow criticism from a place of frustration, but please understand that thats what this is.

The lack of an implements is not just a matter of "less syntax fever!" but one that facilitates other language design choices: in particular static compile time duck-typing. Among the "everybody knows or knows-about" class of languages this is pretty fresh. You can go back and forth on the point of this (or the value of the trade-offs) but it's pretty key to Go's flavor. As a Java geek, I'm pretty familiar with the way you'd prefer and I like it quite a bit too, but once I'd tried it, I've really missed Go's flavor more than a handful of times.

Static duck-typing has some great downstream ecosystem effects. For one, it really facilitates smaller, tight interfaces. If my code uses a type A from another package B, and A has 20 functions that in my code only uses 3 of, I can create an interface on my end with just the 3. Then any testing or any alternative implementations apply only to the minimal interface. If that alternative implementation is by another author, it can interop with my code without importing type A package B. Obviously you don't need this all the time but it's killer when you do.

No doubt our different perspectives are a result of us doing different things with Go.

I don't write compilers or other "highbrow" Computer Science-heavy programs. I most frequently find myself writing interface software, data converters, text extractors, near-system utilities. Lots of the kind of things some people might write in C or Perl. As a result, my usage of data types, even structs, is pretty light. Turns out I can do most of my work with the built-in types: integers, characters, strings, arrays and hashes. I rarely even need/use interfaces!

Data types don't play a big role in my work. Your mileage may vary, obviously.

>GO syntax is very regressive comparing to where we hopped programming languages should go.

Speak for yourself maybe, but I appreciate Go's overall style. You also mention Rust and Scala in your post. If that is to be the future of language syntax, I should quit.

The syntax being regressive is pretty objective. It's not a value judgement. It has it's pros and cons.

I like that I can dive into pretty much any Go code and it won't be doing anything basic some way I'm not used to or can't very quickly figure out without having to look anything up. Kinda like Java in that regard, but even more so, plus way less verbose.

I mean it's gotten better but take Javascript where just a few years ago fundamental branching & execution order and might be provided by some library and it wasn't always the same one (thinking especially of various competing promise libraries) or friggin' imports might look different. Or Rails where you might have a codebase come across your laptop that's in some version you haven't used recently and using a bunch of libraries you're not used to and now half the symbols in a given file aren't defined there or anywhere else that Grep can find and it's unclear where they even come from, so it's off to the docs for a bunch of abandoned gems to get any sense of what's even going on.

Go mostly avoids that sort of deeply unproductive junk. It does achieve that by not providing certain things, plus static typing (thank god for TypeScript, finally some sanity). I'm OK with that. I don't use it as my daily driver but I'm never even a little sad to drop into or contribute to a Go codebase, and I don't need a huge margin of uncertainty on the question "how fast can you get up to speed with this?" for Go code, which I can't say of just about any other language, sight-unseen.

Go is pretty verbose, especially error handling, vs modern Java code.

You and I clearly have different error handling strategies.

I will say that a rust-style error propagation operator would cut verbosity even further. (Though that is harder to do in go with their choice of multiple return over sum types.)

Still, try/catch seems far more verbose for common error handling strategies to me. And I'd rather see an acknowledgement that something can fail as close to that thing as possible, rather than hunting thorough the stack to find some global try/catch block that silently swallows the error in order to cut down on verbosity.

I'd rather have the choice to handle it locally or not. If you have bad habits you have bad habits and another language isn't going to fix that. If Go adapts Rust style then I would agree, it could get to be where you can choose to handle the errors locally or up the stack, like exceptions, and you will be in a better place.

It's less about bad habits and more about there being a clear and consistent signal for what can throw or not. It's similar to why I like options over nulls despite the fact that you're basically doing the same thing in both systems.

If only Java's particular implementation hadn't ruined the public opinion on checked exceptions...

What do you think is the best way to handle checked exceptions?

This comes up all the time on HN and I've personally landed on preferring Java's checked/unchecked system from anything else I've seen. I get that sometimes you should handle your errors in the small, like Go's errors or Rust's Maybe (or Try?) styles might prefer, but I hate not having any exceptions options to "let things crash".

Rust's Result<T, E> and similar options in other languages are by far my favorite, especially with the `?` operator and pattern matching to go along with them.

Rust and golang do both also contain a `panic` that allows you to just "let things crash". But by being separate from the standard methods of error handling, they tend to be used in actual exceptional circumstances.

I'm not a fan of exceptions in general, but a system that had exclusively checked exceptions, but didn't require such verbosity would be nice. Perhaps an annotation that says a method can throw, and any method without that annotation cannot throw?

If experts' code never becomes more clear and concise than novices', there's no payoff for getting better with the language, and nobody ever really gets up to speed.

Big IMHO disclaimer, but:

Yes! If expert code and novice code look pretty much the same, that is great!

I think rather than futzing around with the language, go frees you to think harder about the problem domain.

Better architecture, design decisions, problem domain modelling, documentation / communication, core data structure and algorithm selection, api design - these are the things that distinguish expert from novice output, not statement level expressiveness.

There's obviously a line to be drawn somewhere! - an expert can write "good" code and develop useful systems in GW Basic, but few would voluntarily choose to in 2019. Really though, the runtime limits the problems you can solve in GW Basic more than the language syntax.

I think this is why go focuses a lot on the runtime - low latency gc, concurrency, etc - at the high end of programming ability the limits on what problems you can solve in a language (without dropping down / calling out) are dictated by the power of your runtime, not language syntax.

As a data point, when I think about programmers with the most impactful software outputs (rather than talks, essays etc) it's hard to overlook the C programmers. Git could have been written in any number of languages but fairly straightforward C is enough to get the job done.

The "expert" work in git exists at a much higher level than the source code.

>there's no payoff for getting better with the language, and nobody ever really gets up to speed.

Or maybe it's an indication that I should spend less time playing code golf and more time building what I actually set out to build.

I'd imagine an expert could write a better, performant database than a novice and the fact that can be achieved in language that will effectively communicate to a novice is arguably a good thing.

Novices should see queues and sorted sets by their proper names. They should see reduce(map(filter(…))), not big loops that inline all three written from scratch repeatedly because experts didn't want the compiler doing work that might make it slower.

This will probably confirm your point. I write software professionally for 20 years. I’ve written professionally in: perl, php, java, cfml, actionscript 2 and 3, javasctipt / node, c#, java, erlang, ruby, scala, python and golang. The last year almost exclusively golang. I work full back end / distributed systems and infrastructure automation.

I find golang simplicity liberating, especially now with GO111MODULE.

No need for stuff like node’s package.json, no maven’s project.xml (I have no problem with maven), no sbt, small native binaries (this is where golang, in my head, beats erlang), simple type system. Instead of focusing on designing the ins and outs of the architecture, it allows me to focus on the flow, like erlang! The structure, design, come later, with proper unit and integration tests.

I love it, it is so simple to switch from r&d mode into production grade system development.

It sucks when you're writing it, but makes up for it when working with other people's code.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com