Comment by oriesdan | Hacker News Reader

Comment by oriesdan | Hacker News Reader

After 9 years of ruby, I finally switched to Go as my professional language 3 years ago, after a couple years of side projects with it.

My feelings after building for that long : safety and productivity.

I initially thought it was because of moving to compiler and type checking, but then I learned C for my personal use (an other thing passing through Go allowed for me), and was surprised to realize my C compiler was not allowing me close to the same peace of mind than my Go one. Go is just a well-designed language that makes everything straightforward.

The main reason I started learning and building with C is that I'm not confident the code I write in Go will age well. The discussions around Go-2 make me extremely nervous (it has something that reminds me of angular-2, python-3, symfony-2, bootstrap-3, and others major redesigns who left developers in a lot of troubles, I hope time will prove me incorrect).

So basically, I'm enjoying it, but I worry if it will last. I guess that means I really love it.

Re. Go 2. The Go Team people have repeatedly said that they want to avoid the Python 3 situation, so even if there will be a real, compatibility breaking Go 2, it won't be anywhere near that level of incompatibility. They'll probably just fix a few nits like string(int).

Re. C. You really should use at least one static analyser when programming in C. Clang-tidy has been my go-to tool for that, and it's been working pretty good.

Thanks, I'll have a look at it.

Can't say for the rest, but Symfony 2 was a resounding success. Current Symfony 5 is very similar to Symfony 2, with just a ton of refinements and facelifts.

Oh yes, I'm not saying those are bad projects. What they have in common is that migrating from previous version to them was especially difficult and painful.

The few symfony developers I know indeed loved symfony-2 very much. But migrating their projects from symfony-1 to symfony-2 was felt basically as a rewrite.

You're right, Symfony 1 -> Symfony 2 was definitely a rewrite, but from then on, the general design was kept almost intact (again, not counting the evolution and streamlining of the framework).

I guess the first attempt is always tricky, let's see if Go 2 can find a smooth upgrade path.

I'm not sure taking C as your other example of a type safe language will make the concept look that good.

Try learning Kotlin. I think you'll find it a significant upgrade in safety and productivity compared to Go, but especially compared to C.

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