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Comment by disintegrator | Hacker News Reader

I just love how this language marches forward. I have so many colleagues that hate many aspects of it but I sit here combining Go, Goa and SQLc writing mountains of code and having a fairly good compiler behind me. I understand what I’m missing out on by not using stricter languages and so often it’s a totally fine trade off.

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Go is the only language where I've come back to a nontrivial source code after 10 years of letting it sit and have had zero problems building and running. That alone, for me, more than makes up for its idiosyncrasies.

As a more sysadmin/ops focused guy it really is the killer feature. Static binaries and a more Java-esque resource profile than say Python are the cherries on top.

i have read that same point said multiple times on hn about both common lisp and perl, including in a recent thread about perl.

The difference is that going back to Go code you've written a few years ago, isn't nearly as bad as going back to Perl code you've written a few years ago!

And having written a lot of Common Lisp, Go code is extraordinarily straight forward in a sense where every developer writes in almost the exact same style.

This is not true for Common Lisp (even though it's not as bad as people make it out to be).

I feel the exact same way with C versus C++, even if I was the person to write the C++.

Nonsense! Different strokes for different folks! I feel very leery of people who end their sentences with exclamation marks! ;)

as is often said on hn, the plural of anecdote is not data.

and ...

different strokes for different folks.

qed.

If someone said that about Perl, they're lying.

then the person on hn who said that is a liar.

hey, chatgpt, quick, what's the shrug emoji? ah disremember.

I’ve had the same experience with old rust packages. But nothing quite so old - at least not yet!

Yes, but with all the v2 in stdlib popping up we will get a lot of outdated code and a lot of "I need to know v1 and v2, because I will come across both".

But "outdated code" isn't inherently bad, is it? v1 code is still supported by the stdlib and it still does its job, at least until Go 2.x drops.

In fact, v1 code usually uses v2 code under the hood, but with different options to maintain backwards compatibility.

You still get performance improvements even if you don’t switch over to the new import!

A good example is io/ioutil. It's useful to migrate to eliminate the deprecation messages, but you don't need to do it right away.

Also, most of this can be automated with `go install golang.org/x/tools/gopls/internal/analysis/modernize/cmd/modernize@latest && modernize -fix ./...`

In all fairness 10 years ago the deps would have been vendored in. Which side steps a whole set of problems if security, remote api version compat and features are not a major need

I have worked in C++, Java and .NET codebases older than many HNer and still keep going strong.

Okay, C++ is believable, but can you really build a Java / .NET project that was not touched for 20+ years with no changes to the code or the build process (while also using the latest version of the SDKs)?

I imagine you can _make_ a project compile with some amount of effort (thinking maybe a week at most) but they wouldn't be exactly "unzip the old archive and execute ./build.bat".

Yes, because Ant exists since 2000, Maven exists since 2004, and MSBuild since 2003.

Before it was a common procedure to have central package management, we used to store libraries (jars and dlls), on source control directly in some libs folder.

Afterwards, even with central package management, enterprise software when done right, is not calling the Internet in every build, rahter there are internal repositories that are curated by legal and IT, and only those packages are allowed to be used in projects.

So the tooling is naturally around after 20+ years, no one is doing YOLO project management when playing with customer's money.

As for the "...latest version of the SDKs..", that is moving the goal posts, there is no mention of it on,

> Go is the only language where I've come back to a nontrivial source code after 10 years of letting it sit and have had zero problems building and running. That alone, for me, more than makes up for its idiosyncrasies.

All fair, but:

> As for the "...latest version of the SDKs..", that is moving the goal posts, there is no mention of it on [...]

I thought it was implied since tooling & library breakages over the years happen and sometimes you can't just get the old SDK to run on the latest Windows / macOS. If the languages and Ant/Maven are backwards compatible to that extent, that's actually pretty good!

I had to deal with moving a .NET Framework 4.7 project to .NET Standard 2.0 and it wasn't effortless (although upgrading to each new .NET release after that has been pretty simple so far). We took a couple of weeks even though we had minimal dependencies since we're careful about that stuff.

Ant and Maven have existed for a long time, but for me they didn't prevent Java (and other JVM language) projects from suffering significant bitrot in the build process.

For example, I worked on a project that just stopped being able to be built with Maven one day, with no changes to the JVM version, any of the dependencies, or the Maven version itself. After a while I gave up trying to figure it out, because the same project was able to be built with Gradle!

Older Scala projects were a pain in the ass to build because the Typesafe repositories stopped accepting plain HTTP connections, requiring obscure configuration changes to sbt. I've never had to deal with things like that in the world of Go.

This. Maintainability and refactorability are some of the major Go superpowers for me which enables getting into any code base and updating it. These are supported by features like static typing, fast compile times, etc.

Of note, I've found this to be very important with AI generated code, where it's easy to grok and refactor AI code.

I've gotten used to golang, though it's still not my favourite language to program in by any stretch. One issue I've been having, though, is the documentation.

Documentation for third-party modules in Python is fantastic, almost universally so. In nearly every case of using a third-party library, large or small, there's sufficient documentation to get up and running.

Golang libraries, however, seem to be the opposite. In most cases there's either no documentation whatsoever on how to use things, or, more commonly, there is example code in the readme which is out of date and does not work at all.

The IDE integration with golang is great, and it makes some of this a bit easier, but I also still get a ton of situations where my editor will offer some field or function that looks like what I want (and is what I'm typing to see if it will autocomplete) but once I select it it complains that there's no such field or function. Still haven't figured that out.

So yeah, I dunno. The language is 'great'; it certainly has some extreme strengths and conveniences, like the fact that 'run this function with these arguments in a separate thread' is a language keyword and not some deep dive into subprocess or threading or concurrent.futures; the fact that synchronization functionality is trivially easy to access; Sync.Once feels so extremely obvious for a language where concurrency is king, and so on.

Still, the ecosystem is... a bit of a mess, at the best of times. Good modules are great, all other modules are awful.

I quite frankly will just read the code. Go generally discourages abstractions so any code you jump into is fairly straightforward (compared to a hierarchy of abstract classes, dependency injected implementations, nested pattern matching with destructuring etc etc).

Regarding your IDE issues- I’ve found the new wave of copilot/cursor behavior to be the culprit. Sometimes I just disable it and use the agent if I want it to do something. But it’ll completely fail to suggest an auto complete for a method that absolutely exists.

> Go generally discourages abstractions so any code you jump into is fairly straightforward

This is a really anti-intellectual take. All of software engineering is about building abstractions. Not having abstractions makes the structure less easy to understand because they're made implicit, and forces developers to repeat themselves and use brittle hacks. It's not a way to build robust or maintainable software.

Go does have plenty of abstractions.

I think the more charitable interpretation is "Go generally discourages metaprogramming." Which I would agree with, and I think positively distinguishes it from most popular languages.

Go mostly only have abstractions that the language designers put into the language. It is (mostly) hostile to users defining their own new abstractions.

A case in point is that arrays and maps (and the 'make' function etc) were always generic, but as a user until fairly recently you couldn't define your own generic data structures and algorithms.

Did you cherry pick that part of the sentence and ignored "(compared to a hierarchy of abstract classes, dependency injected implementations, nested pattern matching with destructuring etc etc)." on purpose or?

Yeah this is exactly the stuff that you'll have to reinvent yourself on an ad-hoc basis in any sufficiently large project.

I would argue it's sorta related to Greenspun's tenth rule: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenspun%27s_tenth_rule

Of course, you'll probably retreat and say "Go is better for small projects", but every large project started as a small one, and it's really hard to justify rewriting a project in a new language in a business context.

You don't need a hierarchy of abstract classes, dependency injected implementations, nested pattern matching with destructuring, etc for any project. If one decides to implement these techniques in an ad-hoc basis in Go to solve problems, that's more to do with trying to apply principles and techniques from other languages in Go.

Go discouraging abstracts is sorta just... wrong anyways. Go doesn't discourage building abstractions, it discourages building deep / layered abstractions.

That is a key point in my opinion. A typical stack trace of a Spring (Java) application can easily be 1000 to 2000 lines long. That is not so common in Go, as far as I know (I'm not a Go expert ...).

Building abstractions and adding more layers goes hand in hand, e.g. see OSI layers.

So GI indeed discourages abstractions.

Not really, it's more like it encourages "wide" abstraction (lots of shallow abstractions) that get pieced together vs heavily nested abstractions that encapsulate other abstractions. It's a very imperative language.

Nor is Spring Boot with hidden implicit behaviour all over the show. Nor are AbstractProxyFactoryBeans, or IOC containers.

Code you can read and understand linearly and end to end is hugely underrated.

>> Go generally discourages...

Really, there is nothing in the language that prevents you from creating crazy AbstractFactoryFactories or doing DI. What really prevents this is the community. In enterprise C# / Java, insanity is essentially mandated.

Generally I found updated example in one of the test files. Or I could understand how to use library by reading test files in the repo. For me it's the opposite problem, python documentation is too long in some cases and it's not intuitive to find what I want if it's not trivial, and had to use websearch or llm.

Python package documentation is abysmal. It tends to read like a novel and yet still only covers surface layer details with simplistic examples. It's next to impossible to just "get an overview" of what's available: just show me the modules, classes, functions, etc. Don't make me spend 30 minutes trying to find an explanation for that one function which just takes a kwargs, which ends up only being covered in thr footnote of some random page in the documentation on something otherwise completely unrelated.

It's madness.

I wrote a lot of Java in a past life, and the documentation situation is night and day, for sure. I think it's partly a syntax/tooling issue, and partly a cultural thing. Luckily Go's standard library (+ `/x/` modules) lets me avoid third-party dependencies in many cases. The documentation from the Go team is very good in my opinion.

This is so true and unfortunate because golang has an inbuilt example function that closely follows the test functions. It means that all that really needs to change is how godoc promotes or badges libraries with examples.

I think Go de-emphasises the ecosystem a lot.

Generally gophers just use the standard library as much as possible. There isn't the usual set of "must-have" dependencies, and generally speaking when a gopher tries to solve a problem, the first step isn't to search for a 3rd party library that solves it for them.

Obviously this is a broad generalisation and there are plenty of gophers who swear by using one or more libraries, and there are plenty of gophers who do rely on third-paarty dependencies. But this is still noticeably less prevalent than in many other languages, especially the more popular ones in web dev.

As others have said, it also helps that Go code is easy to read and emphasises simplicity. The code is often more readable than the documentation, for sure. Whether you consider this bad documentation is up to you ;)

I enjoy the Go ecosystem quite a bit and haven't found many issues with documentation. I love how open source modules are documented on pkg.go.dev, including those from major providers, like AWS, Google, etc. Every library has the same references. When examples are useful, such as with charting modules, I've found that the projects do provide them. On the occasion where the README.md code is out of date, it's been easy for me to check pkg.go.dev and update it myself.

> my editor will offer some field or function that looks like what I want (and is what I'm typing to see if it will autocomplete) but once I select it it complains that there's no such field or function

Are you using copilot?

Any language that helps me put food on my family table is a good language. For me, that has been the case with both Ruby and Go.

I did not like it at first but it has grown on me. I still have my gripes, which are mostly things that come from its overall architecture and will never be resolved, but it is pretty enjoyable to use for the limited domain I use it in at work.

I love it because the average Go project has so few dependencies.

While I agree, one thing that would really help there is the notion of test dependencies separate from ones that will end up in a production binary.

Testify in particular is widely used in tests yet pulls in an entire YAML parser.

Only if you are not using Kubernetes.

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