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Comment by Jabbles | Hacker News Reader

Go has a way of programming. Go is totally optimized for that way of programming, in fact. Programming any way other than Go’s way, with Go, will be that recipe for frustration I bounced my skull against. Go’s way is not pretty to someone indoctrinated with the modern functional aesthetic, but it works, and works well. Really well.

A good summary of programming in Go.

However I would like you to give some examples of inconsistencies in Go. And I believe that leaving features out ("anything a modern programming language is supposed to include") makes Go cleaner, safer and more understandable than any other language I know of (IMO).

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From what I was able to gather, the authors gripes tend to be with the lack of meaningful whitespace and "tabs".

Both the goto arguments of someone who lacks enough understanding of language fundamentals to point out any actual flaws.

For the sake of accuracy there was also some stuff in there about a conflict between first-class functions and the type system, and some stuff about errors being easy-to-ignore return values.

Yes, and those are pretty solid points. Too substantial to just sweep under the rug.

I'm a die-hard Python/PEP8 fan. Non-significant whitespace, I could take or leave, but tabs as indentation just make sense. You're separating form from content, which, as programmers, we should be all for.

As a pedant and an anal retentive person, I love gofmt. It's a big part of my coding peace of mind.

As I describe language structure in Go to people, I keep telling them that "go fmt" is an amazing tool that you will wish you had for every language. I am met with many incredulous stares at the suggestion that a program that messes with your formatting could be a good thing... but it is!

>From what I was able to gather, the authors gripes tend to be with the lack of meaningful whitespace and "tabs".

Then you weren't able to gather enough. Besides tons of other stuff he mentions in the post, he has a comment below it adding:

- The existence of make() for the "our language is not powerful enough for us to express our language" tops the list for me. A couple more off the top of my head:

- Stack allocation is quietly converted to heap allocation iff a pointer to the stack allocated object escapes.

- Maps, channels, and slices are non-pointer reference "special" types.

- Struct literals require a dangling a comma, but you cannot use dangling commas elsewhere.

- make(), new(), and import() all look like function invocations, but are also syntax(ish) (and have special support in the parser). In the case of the first two, they even return values.

>Both the goto arguments of someone who lacks enough understanding of language fundamentals to point out any actual flaws.

Well, then again, the above looks like the goto response of someone that didn't really got the article (which show a great understanding of Go, even if we forget the added clarifications in the comment section).

The `make` function is an example of an inconcistency. The language does not have generics, yet this built-in function is a generic one.

As far as Go being safer and cleaner because it lacks modern language features, generics would make the language safer (compare to casting all over the place, which is less safe, and has a runtime cost). Some modern languages also don't have null pointers, further increasing safety.

Generics aren't included for two reasons:

1. They haven't figured out a way to implement them without impacting performance significantly

2. They're not as necessary as you might think.

While they're open to adding them if #1 changes, in response to #2, I find I don't miss them as much as I would have thought - and that's coming from a strong advocate of statically typed, functional languages. In idiomatic Go, I just don't need them as often as I would have thought, and the interfaces are well-designed enough to make up for much of the difference.

http://golang.org/doc/go_faq.html#Why_doesnt_Go_have_feature...

I have read those same arguments over and over.

Just because generics do not come up as often does not mean they won't make programs safer and/or faster. Almost all of the workarounds I have seen for the lack of generics can easily be applied to Java for instance.

There were several questions that came up on the Go mailing list asking how to convert certain code to make it more "idiomatic". The resulting code had several layers of indirection, interfaces composed of interfaces, and so on, that ironically it would have looked much more concise, and would have been type safe in a more "traditional OO" language like Java.

Not sure why you would expect to hear anything but the same thing over and over, in response to the same complaint being raise.. over and over.

I don't think anyone denies that adding generics, if done properly, would improve the language. The only real controversial thing being suggested is that generics are not worth an implementation that is not up to standards. Personally, I think that is a reasonable position.

When people mention that they don't find generics necessary, they should mention the type of work they do. For someone building an application, I can believe that one can do without generics, and still get a good application out. However, for someone writing a library, I think that their absence will be much more noticeable.

I don't really view "make" as inconsistent - the fact that builtin functions have special powers doesn't strike me as particularly unusual. If they didn't I presume they'd just be part of the standard library.

Besides, it seems that the inconsistency (if any) is the fact that the rest of the language doesn't have generics - something that I hope will be resolved in the future, but without which I am coping surprisingly well.

Finally, null pointer dereference does not cause undefined behaviour, as in C, C++. Go will panic (and you can safely recover). I'm not convinced that removing null pointers will eliminate the cause of these bugs. I think the idea of "failing fast" would help diagnose bugs much faster - although I see reasons for disagreeing. I do not think Go is intended or recommended for safety-critical applications, where special languages such as Ada are used.

> the fact that builtin functions have special powers doesn't strike me as particularly unusual. If they didn't I presume they'd just be part of the standard library.

It strikes me that the primary expectation of a built-in function is not having to import anything, and not having to namespace-qualify it on use. It circumventing the type system IS a surprise. In Go, I believe not only generic-ness appears, but also overloading.

Go as a complete package is very cool, though! I think the reason its warts get brought up disproportionately often is a reaction to its evangelists going a bit overboard in claims of simplicity/orthogonality.

> Finally, null pointer dereference does not cause undefined behaviour, as in C, C++. Go will panic (and you can safely recover). I'm not convinced that removing null pointers will eliminate the cause of these bugs. I think the idea of "failing fast" would help diagnose bugs much faster - although I see reasons for disagreeing.

Dereferencing nulls in Java is not undefined either, so what? And the notion of 'failing fast' is exactly why null pointers should be modeled in the type system. What faster way to catch bugs than at compile time? Furthermore, how do you know you will quickly hit a NPE in you code at runtime, if it happens to be in a code path that is infrequently accessed? Ironically in the OSCON talk mentioned in another comment here, Pike mentions that dynamic typing is pushing some compile time errors into runtime, which is exactly what is happening here.

The crucial difference is that static typing is a well understood problem.

The subset of "modern languages without null pointers" and "languages used to write a lot of serious software" is zero.

And notice "a lot" in this sentence. Majority of serious software is still written in languages like C++ or Java, which are either much less safe than Go or at about the same level of un-safeness.

While I'm sure someone wrote serious software in Haskell, very few (comparatively speaking) did. We can theorize why "modern languages without null pointers" failed to take off at the scale of Java or Python, but that they failed is a fact and that makes all their properties, including lack of null pointers, of questionable utility in the craft of actually writing useful software.

Go is a pragmatic, minimalistic languages, built on proven and well understood ideas.

> that they failed is a fact and that makes all their properties, including lack of null pointers, of questionable utility in the craft of actually writing useful software.

This seems like something akin to the just world fallacy. So far, no language with feature X has achieved mainstream success; therefore, feature X is of questionable utility. I don't think this makes much sense. Programming languages are combinations of a large number of features and design decisions, any of which (or none of which!) could be responsible for their unpopularity. Some features have value that is immediately obvious once you've experienced them, irrespective of the viability of the overall language they may be embedded in.

Every language that becomes popular, including Go, brings something new to the table that wasn't present in mainstream languages previously. In fact, it is precisely the languages that don't bring anything new that don't tend to become popular. There are many, many features that Go has that haven't appeared in mainstream languages before, and this is a good thing.

Besides, Scala code tends to avoid null (it's only in there for compatibility with the JVM), and it has quite a few users.

>I don't really view "make" as inconsistent - the fact that builtin functions have special powers doesn't strike me as particularly unusual. If they didn't I presume they'd just be part of the standard library.

It's not unusual (as it happens elsewhere too), but it IS inconsistent.

A builtin function should just mean: it's always available and not part of the importable library. Not "special behavior".

My least favorite feature is block scoping combined with the := operator.

For example, this works:

  var x Foo
  x, err := doSomething()
  if err != nil {
    ...
  }

this does not:

  var x Foo
  if x, err := doSomething(); err != nil {
    ...
  }

This pattern (or some variant) introduces more bugs in my code than I would like to admit.

What do you mean by 'does not work'? Your second example will work but the x declared in the if statement will be local to that statement (note not to the block but the entire statement).

In both cases you have redeclared x. In the second the scope is different.

See: http://play.golang.org/p/c9B-FXL0Fw

   var i = 0; <--- valid
   i := 0 <--- Valid

   for (i := 0; ...) <--- Valid
   for (var i = 0; ...) <--- Invalid

No?

I'm not sure how much you know about Go based on your comment, but you have a ; in the first line that is not legal in Go (and you haven't declared the type); you have parens on your for loop and that too is not valid.

If I rewrite your comment in correct Go I get

  var i int = 0 // valid
  i := 0        // valid

  for i := 0; ... { // valid
  for var i int = 0; ... { // Not valid

Your final line there is only needed if you want to define the type of i at declaration time inside a for loop. That would be better written

  for i := int(0); ... {

Sure; I was just saying, the parent comment asked for an example of inconsistency there it is.

Either allow the use of var to declare a variable, or dont.

Dont mix and match in different contexts; this clearly violates the go goal of consistent syntax.

Edit, incidentally the use of var is perfectly legal like this:

    package main
    import "fmt"

    func main() {
      var a = 10
      b := 10

      fmt.Printf("%d %d\n", a, b);

      for i := 0; i < 10; i++ {
        fmt.Printf("%d Value\n", i)
      }
    }

Actually, the following is valid syntax in Go 1.0 and later:

    var i = 0

The use of "var" without a type is a common idiom when binding global variables, such as:

    var ErrTooLarge = errors.New("bytes.Buffer: too large")

Oddly, the := shortcut is not legal in the global context. Also fun:

    var (
        i = 0
        j = 0
    )

So, going back to the original comment -- yes, Go has some odd little shortcuts and inconsistencies.

Why is := not valid in the global context? I have been bitten by this time and time again. Is there a reason for it? It makes no sense to me.

I believe the answer is related to the simplicity of the parser.

I see, thank you. Too bad this wart is exposed, though.

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