exch

There's a typo in the title of the second 'chapter'.

"That’s great. But wa/s/ has all this got to do with web design?"

Interesting read for sure. And certainly nice to see Go being subjected to some real-world use.

About the need to represent the CKAN ORM in Go, in order to get some useful JSON deserialization going; I have found this be to useful myself in a few cases. mainly when wrapping RESTful services exposed as JSON.

You mentioned it was 'unexpected', but would you also qualify it as a downside to the way python handled this?

With a large object model, I can see how maintenance becomes a little tricky. Specially since Go has no notion of object relations.

Being over 30 myself, I find Khan Academy useful as well. Even if it's just to quickly brush up on a subject I happen to need and forgot all about.

If I were hiring, you would qualify. Under the sole condition that, whenever you were to speak, you would use that language form.

I would wager it's also an issue of corporate politics. If these leaves are capable of creating a sustainable in-house power generator, you will have no more need to buy electricity from your local provider. (Or at least in significantly reduced quantities). This obviously won't sit well with them.

Consider then that it's these companies which have the expertise to develop and commercialize a technique like this. You need to keep them on your friendly side when you are about to market. Going for those locations which are not paying customers anyway, is a safe move from an economic p.o.v. At least until said corporation can figure out a way to monetize the new product in a way that does not reduce their profit.

I am very surprised MS is allowing this project to exist. Maybe I'm missing something, but isn't there a real threat that MS is going to come down on this with the rage of a thousand suns?

Don't get me wrong, I'm all for an open source alternative to windows. Just pointing out some (possibly misplaced) concern.

I'm not a big fan of Ubuntu spin offs, but this one at least has the merit of booting very quickly. The 'lightweight' label is not misplaced. I did find some bugs in the UI. Most notably the layout of the "Run Everything" menu (tab headers) was a bit messed up.

Which brings me to the name of this menu item. Seeing something labeled "Run Everything" does not inspire me with confidence and zest to click it. Of course I did anyway and was relieved to find that it did, in fact, not actually run everything, but just let you pick a specific application to run.

I will have to play with it some more for a better feel. It definitely needs polishing, but it's not a bad start.

I do agree with the choice of editor and file manager pointed out by a poster below me. I'm sure there are some other applications I would have changed, but to be honest, that is all mostly a matter of taste.

Of course. If the supplier of their input is a third party, I will even go so far as to file the appropriate bug reports with said third party for them.

I couldn't agree more with this.

I may be overdoing it a bit here, but personally I don't agree with Torvald's p.o.v. at all. While user experience is obviously important, allowing mistakes like this to go unchallenged by simply providing a work-around just encourages people to write broken software. Specs exist for a reason. Ignoring them is not it.

I do this in my own software as well. If a user files a bug because input X fails to process as expected -- and it turns out his/her input does not meet the spec -- I do not supply a fix. Even if his/her supplied input is widely used in 'the wild'. While this alienates a considerable user base, I refuse to be part of the problem.

I don't mean to be nit-picky, but if you make a router store data so it can do its job, then it is by definition designed to store data. Even of that is not its main purpose.

Something as simple as the configuration files for the router (or a web front end to edit said config) would make it qualify.

The law is indeed not a computer program, but it does in general seek to be extremely explicit about everything it defines. It has to be. And in this case as well, it is very explicit about what defines a 'computer'. The way I see it, the judge did not really understand what a router really is (or can be). And consequently made an incorrect ruling that is likely to influence future rulings in similar cases.

This is one case where I am happy that one ruling does not require other judges to abide by the same ideas. One can only hope that other judges are more informed if and when the situation arises.

It looks nice and clean.

A quick note though: Hitting the 'Change' button in the modal dialog does not get rid of the page overlay, making everything inaccessible. (Chrome 10)

For me this was something I missed when I started with Go about a year ago (at that point my brain was still filled with years of C# dogma). I was not very familiar with Go's own way of doing things back then. Go may seem familiar at first glance, but there are some peculiar little differences which offer new and novel ways of dealing with a problem. Unfortunately these are very difficult to explain to someone who is not already familiar with the language.

At this point I don't miss generics at all. The benefit they would give me are marginal enough to not consider it a vital component.

I've found that when you become proficient in Go, you will write different code that does not really require generics to be present. At least 99% of the time.

Having said that, I am still hoping that we might one day get unions. Unfortunately there is little hope of that at this point. It has been considered, but they would have to be type-safe in order not to circumvent Go's type system. And doing so, would differentiate them very little from Go's existing 'interface{}' type. There is a small benefit to unions, but apparently not big enough to warrant implementing them.

As far as generics go, they are not out of the question. The problem so far has been that nobody has yet offered a generics proposal that doesn't partially or completely mess up the language and generally make things more difficult for everyone.

I have a lot of Go packages and apps on my github repos.

Nothing really very big (yet), but mostly 'scratching my itch' stuff. I do thoroughly enjoy writing Go code, which is why I stick with it. A large project where I can use it will present itself sooner or later.

Add to that the fact that the other reactors there have stood up to a 9.1 quake with about 600 aftershocks -- ranging from mild to "I'm a pretty decent disaster all by myself" -- A sizable tidal wave and numerous fires with hydrogen explosions.

This could definitely have been far, far worse by now.

Considering the rather flamboyant and slightly misleading title of the article, I can see why a summary could be useful.

This is the reason why I occasionally do answer question on YA! If nobody comes in to fix the obvious errors, it will always be full of nonsense.

The real danger is that the site is used buy a lot of young people who will consistently walk away with a completely skewed and incorrect notion of the subject they are asking about.

As they say: "Be the change you want to see around you".

I've solved my burnout problems slightly differently. I too made the conscious choice to stop pressuring myself into performing above and beyond what I was able to deliver and decided that my programming work was hence forth strictly going to be done as a hobby. I stopped working in IT completely because it simply was too stressful and no fun at all anymore.

I decided that it was time for a very radical change. So I deliberately went and looked for a profession I would otherwise never even have considered. A friend of mine invited me to a book binding workshop. The old fashioned kind that is. Before that I have never ever done anything with my hands. I was utterly convinced I didn't have this sort of thing in me at all, but I gave it a try anyway because this was exactly the kind of radical change I was looking for. I fell in love with it immediately and have never looked back again. It turned out to be such a wonderful and fulfilling job. No more stress, no more over-ambition. Instead I get to learn a fascinating profession and I go home every day feeling utterly and completely satisfied.

I do still write code, but strictly in my spare time and strictly those projects I know I will enjoy doing. This ensures that it will always remain as much fun as it was when I first started out.

Interesting set of documents. Most of it isn't new to me, but I did find the chapter on character encodings interesting. Hope to see more of that.

"i18n and l10n are big topics in themselves. For example, they cover issues such as colours: while white means "purity" in Western cultures, it means "death" to the Chinese and "joy" to Egyptians. In this chapter we just look at issues of character handling."

While I generally make a concerted effort to supply decent unicode language support, I never really considered the part about colours and symbolism differences and how they may affect potential customers. This is probably something I should be investigating further.

Good to see a great tool like this getting some well deserved publicity. It is most definitely my tool of choice for architectural work of any kind. I have been using it for this purpose since before @Last was acquired by Google, so I had to pay for my licence at the time, but it was (and still is) well worth it.

Did anyone else chuckle at the copyright notice on the floor?

I like it. Performs well and it's entertaining. Although I must admit I have some difficulty getting my right and left hand to accurately control both characters at the same time. That's not so much an issue with the game as it is with my lacking motor control though.

On the other hand, you may just want to patent something to prevent exactly that from happening. Holding a patent does not require you to make money off of it, but it does prevent others from doing so. It's a bit sad that one has to go this far, but there you have it.

You want to ensure the technique remains available to anyone freely: patent it and publish it along with permissive licenses.

Nice article. A quick note though. Channels in Go are not used for Inter Process Communication, they are for communication and synchronization of data between functions.

From Go's spec: "A channel provides a mechanism for two concurrently executing functions to synchronize execution and communicate by passing a value of a specified element type."

I do hope their promises of not contaminating the ecology will hold up in those undoubtedly very harsh conditions. Would be a shame to waste all those years of drilling by introducing foreign 'samples' into the mix.

This is certainly an amazing piece of work.

Someone should file a bug report, cos that is obviously a design flaw.

I've been using Go for various things for quite a while now. I do love the language. If I would use it for any serious large scale project? Perhaps not just yet. There are still some wrinkles that need ironing out. Most notably: Go's GC.

These 'wrinkles' are not fundamental problems with the language though, and most are on the slate for fixing, so it's just a matter of time for Go to be ready for anything. Development pace is still quite furious and improvements are coming out every week.

In the meantime, I thoroughly enjoy using it for smaller tools and assorted bits and bobs. It's a very pleasant language to work with.