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Comment by ashishb | Hacker News Reader

Contributing to a new Go codebase is easy.

The Go codebases look all alike. Not only the language has really few primitives but also the code conventions enforced by standard library, gofmt, and golangci-lint implies that the structure of code bases are very similar.

Many language communities can't even agree on the build tooling.

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I'm still trying to convince the scientists I work with that they should format their code or use linters. Making them mandatory in Go was a good decision.

> I'm still trying to convince the scientists I work with that they should format their code or use linters.

Consider adding a pre-commit hook if you are allowed to.

My group's repos enforce strict rules, theirs does not.

Yeah, I've been there. I would get passed down horribly formatted code from another repo and it showed the data scientists writing it barely knew what they were doing. It was their repo, we couldn't do anything about it. They wouldn't reformat the code, because they were afraid it would break. They also passed us a lot of Python, and you can see where they got this fear from.

I like that I can understand a Go file without deciphering 15 layers of macros.

i've just started learning Go and i really like this aspect. one way to do things, one way to format.. the % operator is a bit confusing for a negative number - that took me down a little rabbit-hole, learning about how a remainder can be different to how i normally think about it.

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